Trump is cowing the American mainstream media: Neil Macdonald

This week, participating in the gaseous airway-filling bloviation television networks deploy around patriotism-infused events like a presidential address to Congress, CNN's normally sensible John King unspooled a bizarre apologia for political journalism.

America's wise voters, declared King, realized early what the national media did not: that President Donald Trump speaks in parables that must be decoded, that "he doesn't speak like we do."

Voters understood, said King, that when Trump promised to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it, that he wasn't really saying Mexico would pay for it. Reporters, on the other hand, insisted on marking it down as an actual election promise, missing the point altogether.

Media failure

King seemed to suggest this was a collective journalistic failure, a result of living in the Washington bubble, out of touch with ordinary American voters, whose plain old common horse sense allowed them to "get" Trump, while mainstream journalism was stupidly taking him literally.

It was a groveling, pathetic performance; the whining of a whipped dog for a caress from the hand that abuses it. (Remember, Trump consistently singles out CNN as one of the nastiest "enemies of the American people," along with "the failing New York Times").

Personally, I prefer the approach of the failing New York Times, which of course isn't failing at all, but prospering, probably because of its unflinching reporting on Trump. The Times stubbornly insists that Donald Trump's lies are just that: lies. And calls them that.

But the Times is an outlier in American journalism; most of the rest of the pack is more supine, more respectful of authority, more frightened of its audience and quickly falling into line.

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In chiding his fellow journalists for not understanding that the falsehoods and utter impossibilities Trump ladles into his never-ending stump speech are mere rhetorical devices, King was repeating the line peddled by Trump surrogates like Vice-President Mike Pence and the Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, the alternative-facts lady, both of whom urge people to concentrate on the president's meaning, rather than his words.

It was an act of supplication on King's part, even an avowal of obedience. And you'll hear a lot more of it in the weeks to come. Trump is cowing the American mainstream media. It's sad — to use one of the president's favourite rejoinders.

But predictable enough.

The media has hardly been the fearless curb on arbitrary authority it believes itself to be. It's mostly bourgeois, genuflecting to power and dedicated above all to defence of the status quo. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, journalists may think they're the watchdogs of the establishment, but are better described as guard dogs.

Add to that the shattered business model of newspapers and conventional newscasts, and rising public skepticism of media fairness and accuracy (pure hatred in the case of Trump's dedicated legions) and the smugness for which journalism is justly criticized has been replaced by cold fear.

Then arrives a president who declares the entire institution an enemy, a man who — even as he himself tells remarkable lies — accuses the media of dishonesty and mendacity, and worse, begins to strangle access, preferring conservative and far-right organizations, excluding outlets like the Times and CNN. Reporters from the Washington Post were routinely banned from Trump events during the campaign. 

That those outlets are among a small group that has done some of the best reporting on Trump, fact-checking him, obtaining his elusive tax records, exposing his fraudulent claims of charitable giving, and of course laying bare the inexplicable and perhaps illegal contacts some of his most senior officials had with Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime as Russian intelligence worked to tilt the outcome of the election, is hardly an accident.

As Trump dispenses his punishment and revenge for that reporting, journalists from other outlets — with the exception of those from Time and the Associated Press, who boycotted a recent press briefing over the exclusions — avert their eyes. Instead of standing with the reporters being frozen out by the White House – does it not occur to them that they'll be next? – they study their notebooks, then clamour obsequiously for the next question.

And, desperate for a return to good old normalcy, they come up with nonsense like John King's parable theory, or slather Trump with praise for sounding "presidential" simply because he restrained himself from insulting someone's religion or ethnicity during one speech to Congress.

As America's journalists desperately pursue reconciliation, trying hard to report what Trump means rather than what he says, they should spare a moment and listen to Marty Baron, a real editor who has so superbly filled Ben Bradlee's shoes at the Washington Post.

Baron, the man who famously stood up to the Roman Catholic church while running the Boston Globe (they made a movie about that) offers his colleagues a bit of advice.

"Just do our job," he says, in his flat, uninflected tone.

"Do it as it is supposed to be done."

A wonderful idea. And almost certainly too much to ask.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.