The Well Made Bed, Ready for Lying
The President giving a briefing to the press about Coronavirus response March 14, 2020. The White House [Public domain]
And that is causing problems and consternation both from those up front and those socially spaced in every third seat on the floor:
Vice President Mike Pence’s office has reversed itself and will now allow two top public health officials to appear on CNN, after earlier blocking the medical professionals from appearing on the network because it has not carried the nightly White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings in their entirety.
Earlier in the day, CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported that Pence’s office had withheld the health experts from the network out of upset that the network had not carried the portion of the press briefings that include the Vice President and other members of the task force. According to CNN, a spokesperson for the Vice President said, “When you guys cover the briefings with the health officials then you can expect them back on your air.”
CNN and other networks have been under pressure to stop airing the press briefings live, out of concerns that they have given President Donald Trump a platform to make unverified claims or relay other forms of misinformation. Even some on-air personalities have urged the networks to at least do more aggressive forms of fact checking. Some, like The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, suggested that Pence’s portion of the briefing, typically a more sobering view of the crisis, was just as if not more essential to cover.
“There’s a big debate going on among folks about whether cable should be airing Trump briefings,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “Okay. But if you’re running the beginning of the briefing, why cut away from Pence and the actual health officials?”
On Wednesday, CNN did cover the portion of the briefing where Trump took questions from the media, and also aired portions where Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx spoke to reporters. But to many viewers, it has meant that networks hop back and forth from the briefing to their news anchors, who have tried to do quick fact checks of some of the statements made.
The bone of contention here is CNN cutting away after the president speaks and takes questions to hold panel discussions over what he just said while the briefing turns to the experts, ostensibly the “public interest” portion of the briefings. Now, how you feel about this current fourth season of the ongoing #1 rated reality show in America “President Trump vs The Media” will color how you feel about such things. The Coronavirus Task Force briefings featuring the president have been getting football-like ratings for the networks, which is remarkable.
Actually, hold that thought. Let’s back up…
The Odyssey of Donald John Trump from golden escalator at his campaign kick-off to his current daily posting behind the podium of the Brady Briefing Room had an interesting media-related footnote. In July of 2015, HuffPost announced, via a brief posting by then-writers Ryan Grim and Danny Shea, that the site would no longer be covering the Trump campaign in the politics section. Rather:
After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.
For those keeping score at home, that lasted until December 7th, when HuffPost declared “We Are No Longer Entertained” and moved the then-Republican frontrunner back to the front page. The rest is history; as it turns out an entertainment background, combined with other factors and circumstances, was enough to win The White House. But the moment was interesting watching one outlet acknowledge, albeit briefly, the blurry lines between entertainment, modern politics, and the media’s role in profiting from the first while covering seond.
Opinions vary on just how much the relentless coverage of candidate Trump added up to in value.The New York Times pegged it at $2 billion while The Street marked it down as $5 billion in free airtime. But most agree all Trump all the time for the news networks accomplished two things: It was great for ratings, and it helped to made New York’s most famous real estate mogul/reality TV star president.
The President’s unique handling, attracting, and — frankly — control over the media and the daily narratives the national political press operate on, will be studied for years to come. But for right now, in real time, traditional media still hasn’t fully figured out what to do with the situation of their biggest ratings draw also not being particularly good for them. Long before coronavirus captivated audiences, how the Brady Briefing Room would conduct business during the 45th presidency has been debated. Alternately over the last three plus years, either the president isn’t having enough press conferences, or should not be covered at all because of the platform the networks give him. Such debate is also a continuation of a similar theme during the 2016 campaign regarding the tsunami of free coverage then-candidate Trump was getting, and whether his rallies should be carried, and should the talking head shows should be dominated by Trump.
Just this week, the third person to hold the official title of “White House Press Secretary” Stephanie Grisham was replaced with out having ever giving a press briefing, traditionally the 1A item on the WHPS’s duties list. Most media and the president’s detractors held such an absurdity up as proof the press was being mistreated again by a president who infamously and gleefully declares with broad strokes that they are “the enemy of the people.” The president’s supporters argue that this non-traditional president doesn’t really need one, is constantly interacting with the press, and haven’t you noticed he’s on TV every day lately and folks still complain. Having gone from no press briefings to daily ones, the old traditional presser is being shoehorned into a new usages while most try to maintain the old rules. The inertia of doing a new thing in the mold of the old way is natural, but predictably not very smooth. Stir in an ab-libbing president with little filter and an antagonist relationship between him and the folks sitting three chairs apart, and it sometimes devolves to straight up cringeworthy.
The protest to that previous paragraph will be a decrying of “both side-isms” while the decryer pivots to their preferred side so let us qualify a bit further: The Brady Briefing Room is a uniquely bad stage for the modern presidency — especially this one — and modern media to be interacting in. There are good presidents and bad presidents. There are good journalists and bad journalists. There is hard news gathering and there is made for TV shows. The traditional press briefing has long since become the latter. To be the president is to have the bully pulpit practically whenever you want it. To be a White House credentialed correspondent is a career highlight, as high profile as it gets short of an anchor’s chair, and the place to make or break your career. To imagine so many factors and personal agendas in a room full of politicians and reporters, broadcast for the world to see, takes a back seat to truth, justice, and the American way just because the lights are on is to be pollyannaish or deliberately obtuse.
“The president lies!!!!” Yes, he does, among other things. Welcome to politics in the year of our Lord 2020. This is not the first, nor will be the last, president that lies, colors, blame shifts, gaslights, and otherwise manipulative of the facts into their own favor. The president had 70 odd years of book available on him when he ran for office, was elected anyway — and to certain supporters because of those traits — and will be president at least through January, if not four more years. Repeating what everyone who cares to know already does isn’t brilliant insight.
“The press is biased!!!” Yes, what are you, new here? The media, the press, or whatever other term you want to use to lump all of reporting together into two or three syllable invecting is made up of people. People, all of them, are biased. Factor in how honestly those folks attempt to broker truth balanced against their jobs and roles in the grand scheme of things as part of discerning who to believe on what subject. But “unbiased” is the stuff for the reading circle on the quiet rug in kindergartens, not the healthy antagonistic give-and-take between the free press and elected officials.
The national news media that centers on the president and the news networks, and the ecosystem of journalists, pundits, and personalities that all thrive in it has to be kept in the proper perspective. TV news on the national level is a business first, television show second, exclusive in-club third, and investigative/reporting units when they have free time from the first three. That isn’t a slam or criticism necessarily, it’s just the reality of the situation of billion dollar media companies covering the most powerful people in America in a high profile way while trying to make a profit. While we are at it, using the term “The media” here is unfair, since there are far more folks doing work in that realm than the privileged few that have hard passes to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The correspondent in Syria trying not to get shot while telling the world of the unspeakable horrors there, or the jailed journalist desperately trying to show the world the brutality of the Chinese Communist Party to the people under their thumb, or the reporter trying to right a wrong through written word and hopefully some video, would love the bandwidth and profile provided to the White House press corps. But till we get a better term, The Media will have to do in this takes-two-to-tango scene.
President Trump wants, needs, and craves the media attention to keep his MAGA train going. The Media needs the rub and ratings from their biggest story and star to make their own names and fortunes on. As those two forces continue to work out their issues in real time, we are going to get more of this symbiotic relationship whether we want it or not.
I suspect we are in the beginning of a change, for good and ill, of how national political media works. In an evolving world where great reporting is more vital than ever, but the business models, mediums, and gatekeeping are not moving at the same speed as technology and appetites. Tough days are ahead for the old guard, with traditional ways navigating the brave new world with the same old linear storytelling in an asymmetric media world. Every person with a smartphone is a videographer, broadcaster, and journalist to the things going around them with platforms to get that message out, at least in their own heads and theories. Just showing the president, then having a panel discussion on what everyone just saw for themselves, only with better production values than the amateurs, isn’t going to cut it in the arena of ideas these days. But chasing the presidents comments and tweets makes for goobs of steady content with minimal effort to acquire, and the path of least resistance and effort also tends to be a profitable one, so here we are.
The president certainly has found a way to bend coverage to his advantage thus far, and will continue to try and do so as he seeks his reelection. The Very Online ebb and flow of the debate over White House press briefings, and by extension coverage of the president himself, of tradition and decorum and norms that must be held, is a mostly a waste of time. The national news media and the president need each other far too much to ever stop talking about each other. At the present, the Brady Briefing Room is not a source of information that can not be garnered anywhere else. It is where opposing sides gather for various reasons of their own to hotbox power and influence in an enclosed area to intensify the high. That isn’t serving anyone well, let alone the American people, and certainly not the principles involved. Everyone is getting their screen time, but no one is looking particularly good here.
But pressers are still good for ratings, and old habits die hard, so tomorrow the president and the media will light up the LED lights and partake in the ritual once again even while arguing for and against it, sometimes both at the same time.
Turns out inertia is a hell of a drug, hotboxed and otherwise.
I think journalists, especially those for TV and other big outfits, are incapable of dealing with someone like Donald Trump. They have absorbed decades of training from J-school onwards that their job is to report objectively and neutrally on things, partially because this avoids alienating market share. Plus they all seem to have this view that their job is to be cheerleaders for “Team America” and that calling the President a bullshitter is not what a cheerleader for Team America does. This is why you have countless takes of “Today is the day Donald Trump became a real President.” Alexandra Petri covered this well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/01/i-think-president-struck-different-tone-today-then-again-i-am-goldfish/
In the last week or two, Seattle’s NPR station stated they would no longer be covering the Presidents briefings live because of the amount of misinformation in those pressers such as his continued boasting of an anti-malarial drug which can be very deadly if not used properly and is not proven to work. But I think for most journalists, the idea of taking a stance like that is something their brains can’t process. COVID-19 is an important story, the President is the President, we must cover his pressers seems to be the only chain of thought many of them can muster.
There is also the fact that “access” journalism means a lot of journalists end up playing the role of courtier whether they realize it or not.
I am not always a fan of the journalism style that Gawker did when they were around but at least they would rather tell the truth as they saw it than get invited to swank parties in Georgetown and Davos for the sake of kissing the asses of the powerful. I imagine CNN’s pundits response to this is “Whatever nerd, have you seen my kitchen remodel?”Report
From the New York Times:
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Reporting is one job that was definitely not helped by professionalization. It used to be something that you did right out of high school or college if you could write well. You started at a local paper covering crime or something like that and worked your way up. A college degree was really only needed if they wanted a journalist with a bit more posh for some very specific beats like diplomatic journalism or the society pages.Report
And now we’re in a place where there are more graduates with journalism degrees, every year, than their are jobs in the industry. Not “available jobs in the industry”, mind. But if every single person in the industry quit today, you could replace each of them with a fresh journalism graduate and still have fresh journalism graduates left over.
I suspect this is why you have sports journalists who hate sports, gaming journalists who hate games, and so on. It’s because they wanted a job doing Real Journalism and this bullshit job where they have to write 800 words about feng shui in Animal Crossing is all that they could get within the industry.Report
The question for me is, among those who do get hired, are they in it to do journalism, or do they want to trade bon mots on Twitter? There are even less paid positions writing op/eds than shoe leather reporting.
Tons of free interships online though.Report
Maybe I’m being overly charitable but I think the people involved don’t really understand the difference. At least not at the national press corps level.
Totally anecdotal but my wife started college as a journalism major at a reputable enough school. She was left with a very negative impression.Report
No, I don’t think they do, charitable or uncharitable.
If, and that is a big if, you are able to bring hard facts to the table, honestly look at them and put forth an opinion that you are going to stand behind, and be prepared to eat a lot of crow, you can earn your way into that august profession. But you really cannot up-jump into it. There are some who can do it, but they spent time in the trenches, working for free and even after all that they are still considered partisan hacks.Report
Oh, and my wife was a language major in college (German) and at this point, even though she is a director at a university, she tries to have as little contact with the liberal arts departments as possible.Report
Sometimes, a journalism degree could hurt too. When my great-grandfather was hired at the Brooklyn Eagle, it was a selling point that he had a degree in something else. The head editor was fond of telling applicants with journalism degrees to go work elsewhere until they had forgotten everything they learned in school and then come back.Report
I think you’re absolutely right. Real journalism involves being a bit of a gutter reptile with a healthy contempt for authority. There’s also a gumshoe aspect of being willing to go out into the world and sniff around in uncomfortable things.
Instead we have a corporate self-styled fourth estate compromised mostly of highly awarded and educated folks who are a terrible combination of overly credulous, lacking in self-awareness, and not all that bright.Report
Seems to me this is a major attractive feature of the many non-corporate online types these days, recognizing many of them eventually get bought up by the corporations.Report
In other words, we have courtiers. Years ago I read a theory that British journalists do a slightly better job at this than American reporters because London is the political, media, and economic capital of the United Kingdom. It also helps that many of the politicians and journalists were educated together and grew up with a mutual distrust. Since American geography is more diffuse, our journalists do not really distrust the politicians so much.Report
Yea I hear in the UK they all come out of the same private schools and upper class social circles. It’s a lot harder to be in awe of people you’ve been in close enough proximity with to see their flaws and foibles up close.Report
There was also an NPR high up who got really defensive a year or so ago when the station was challenged on sticking to objective reporting. I can’t quite remember which of Trump’s many bullshits caused the pushback against NPR in this case.Report
I just appreciate when I listen to NPR there isn’t more than one person talking at a time, which is getting rare these days.Report
Much of the media spent eight years trying out to be fluffers in an Obama porno, and they immediatly (whiplash inducing) showed so much venom to Trump, that at this time unless I hear collaboration form multiple, idiologically differing news sources I basically consider what any of those groups tell me to be BS.
The left aways said Fox was bad, but then the major news outlets turn around and show that was the normal in their world.Report
The Brady Briefing Room is, like the Raised Dais on the Hill, a setting designed to project a powerful image. To that end it still works amazingly well in the 21st Century, so I doubt it will get canned off anytime soon.
That means it is an effective substitute for the campaign rally’s the President is for the moment foregoing, and while it would be great if the Task Force Briefings were the only part covered, its not gonna happen.
So for me, the issue comes down to whether the media outlets involved do any sort of credible job separating the wheat from the chaff. So far I’d give them all a D+ in that regard.Report
But pressers are still good for ratings, and old habits die hard, so tomorrow the president and the media will light up the LED lights
From Politico: “Donald Trump isn’t benefiting from what political scientists refer to as a “rally ‘round the flag” effect — a traditional surge in popularity as the nation unites behind its leader during an emergency situation. Even as the country confronts the greatest disruption to daily life since World War II, a series of new polls released this week show Trump’s approval ratings plateauing in the mid-40s, roughly where his approval rating stood a month ago, before the coronavirus shuttered much of the nation’s economic and social activity.”
From the failing NYT: Aides and allies increasingly believe the president’s daily briefings are hurting him more than helping, and are urging him to let his medical experts take center stage.
Live and die by the sword I guess.Report
That’s hilarious because if the briefings were hurting Trump, the NYTimes, WaPo, and CNN wouldn’t be saying the press shouldn’t air them. Having signaled how successful they think the briefings are, they’re now claiming that it’s the Republicans who say they’re damaging Trump. But if that were true, the media wouldn’t be trying to yank them off the air, they’d be asking Trump to have two or three a day. ^_^
What’s equally interesting is that the press wouldn’t carry live Biden counter-briefings because they’d expose how bad he is. He and his team can sit at his house and spend all day putting together carefully crafted releases, but what results is Biden failing to maintain a coherent line throughout an entire sentence. If those are the takes his people release, what are the takes on the cutting room floor like?
I gave up on decoding the one from two days ago, but since then Biden has demanded Trump release virus data that he says will reveal America’s structural racism. He’s focused on the important things! And let me tell you, if you’re a dog-faced pony soldier who’s up a creek and a wheel falls off, you’re going to need a bigger doghouse.
In a crisis where people are judging leadership style and competence, Biden is the senile grandpa in the upstairs bedroom who only slips downstairs for dinner, and when he does he keeps interrupting everybody to rant about the squirrels raiding his bird feeder, something that never happened in his day because back then people knew what to do about those dang squirrels.Report
That’s hilarious because if the briefings were hurting Trump, the NYTimes, WaPo, and CNN wouldn’t be saying the press shouldn’t air them.
And yet….
Chalk it up to your own priors?Report
““The press is biased!!!” Yes, what are you, new here? ” Nope…pay attention long enough with an open mind, and u realize this. My issue is they keep CLAIMING the aren’t. Don’t lie to my face when I see you actions contradict your protestations of innocence.Report
““The press is biased!!!” Yes, what are you, new here? The media, the press, or whatever other term you want to use to lump all of reporting together into two or three syllable invecting is made up of people. People, all of them, are biased. Factor in how honestly those folks attempt to broker truth balanced against their jobs and roles in the grand scheme of things as part of discerning who to believe on what subject. But “unbiased” is the stuff for the reading circle on the quiet rug in kindergartens, not the healthy antagonistic give-and-take between the free press and elected officials.”
See, this false dichotomy increasingly irks me. You can say “All humans are biased, therefore all reporting is biased”, but to do so you have to ignore any measure of degree in the product and quality of the tradecraft. Humans are by nature imprecise too, yet we have created tools with precision so exacting that it’s difficult to actually understand. Asking for “unbiased” reporting isn’t any less possible or reasonable than asking for any other product to meet spec to a desired precision. We know what cognitive biases are, how they work, and what structured analytic techniques compensate for, minimize, or outright prevent each. Reporting truly could be as accurate as a published scientific paper if that’s the standard we actually trained and demanded reporters to uphold. What we have instead is a failure of interest, because too many customers merely want to be entertained and/or told they are right, too many reporters just want to be rich and/or famous giving those selfsame customers what they want (or aren’t willing or able to do otherwise), and a failure of economics in that there clearly is a market opportunity for fair, objective, timely, accurate reporting…yet we don’t have that anymore, if we ever did. That’s on us and on them.
“the healthy antagonistic give-and-take between the free press and elected officials.””
Are we watching/reading the same news? “Antagonistic” is an excellent word for it, but “healthy” certainly isn’t, and “free” isn’t the best word for a press corp that seems little distinguishable from propaganda arms of the political parties. In the age of “access”, “outrage”, “opinion” and ignorance; where the old guard has mostly been replaced by inexperienced activists and the locals who actually knew their beat personally have been replaced almost entirely by national press sitting smug in their bubbles…the press is NOT healthy or particularly free.Report
This is a good point. Just because it isn’t being done well doesn’t mean it can’t be. Of course the economics seem to be strongly weighted against quality.Report
https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1248705505960345600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1248705505960345600&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefault%26f%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-com%26t_i%3D109805%2520https%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F%253Fp%253D109805%26t_u%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com%252F2020%252F04%252Fim-getting-used-to-it-now%26t_e%3DI%25E2%2580%2599m%2520getting%2520used%2520to%2520it%2520now%26t_d%3DI%2527m%2520getting%2520used%2520to%2520it%2520now%2520-%2520Lawyers%252C%2520Guns%2520%2526%2520Money%26t_t%3DI%25E2%2580%2599m%2520getting%2520used%2520to%2520it%2520now%26s_o%3Ddefault%23version%3Df6dea15c01ce4184f7c793c0abe86ffeReport
And yet the most effective treatment found so far is an antiparasitic paired with an antibiotic. I guess she majored in journalism instead of STEM, but journalists are the least capable people to be trying to cut off information from the publc.Report
Do you mean the French study? “ISAC shares the concerns regarding the above article published recently in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA). The ISAC Board believes the article does not meet the Society’s expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety. “Report