Opinion | Stop Blaming the Press for Trump’s Success

The delusion that a lackadaisical, ratings-mad “media” somehow elected Donald Trump to the presidency has danced, full thighed, back into the news conversation. We were too soft on him in 2016, goes the drift. We handed a liar a megaphone and neglected to turn it off. We delighted in covering him because he delivered clicks. We failed to communicate how aberrant he was, thereby normalizing him. We let him blow through democratic norms.

Such sentiments, expressed in full-throat by former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, but also echoed in part by pundit Bill Press, veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, journalist George Packer, and others, predictably comes paired with the advice that the “media” must radically rethink his coverage should he run again in 2024 as expected. The stories should highlight Trump’s mendacious, anti-democratic ways, and never amplify his lies. If we don’t reform our ways and he wins, we will be charged as accessories to democracy’s murder. Or something akin to that.

But the notion that press “blunders” contributed to Trump’s victory — and that these blunders will elect him again unless the press corps corrects its ways — completely misreads 2016’s coverage. As I’ve written before, from the birth of his candidacy through Election Day, the press rode Trump like a donkey. In the opening weeks of his campaign, it reported and criticized Trump’s racist talk about Mexicans, recounted his status as a liar, billboarded his denigration of John McCain, corrected him when he blamed 9/11 on George W. Bush, charted his sleazy business practices, spelled out his policy ignorance, listed his flip-flops and recorded his misogynistic ways. No presidential candidate in memory outside of George Wallace received harsher coverage. If anything, the press denormalized Trump, rising to declare in unison in the summer of 2015 that the Trump campaign was not just grotesque but also toast.

Despite this coruscating coverage, Trump polled at 30 percent going into the second Republican debate in mid-September 2015, an astonishing feat for a political newcomer in a field of 16. As the campaign progressed, the press poured more of the same on Trump — all deserved, mind you — uncovering his devious use of philanthropy, exposing his lies in fact-checking columns and shaming him for his Muslim-ban plan. Trump did find safe harbor at Fox News Channel and on Morning Joe, and the cable networks covered his rallies with real frequency. But the coverage reflected his status as the front-runner. By the time Trump had secured the nomination, he still commanded the airwaves over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But whose fault was that? Trump made himself available while Clinton consciously backed out of the TV spotlight, as the New York Times reported in a May 30, 2016 piece. Even so, the news about Trump was largely negative. The conservatives at the National Review published a special “Against Trump” issue in January 2016, and the Weekly Standard’s neocons took a similar anti-Trump slant. A full spectrum of the press warned us about who he was.

Once Trump became president, his behavior didn’t change, nor did the critical coverage end. To those who say the press failed to properly call out Trump for his many lies, please consult the news clips. The press did refrain from calling Trump a liar for the first two years of his administration, but by June 2019 the press had overcome that reluctance, as the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported. “It’s (almost) official: The president of the United States is a liar,” Farhi wrote. “Nowadays, many in the news media are no longer bothering to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt. In routine news and feature stories, Trump’s dishonesty carries no fig leaf. It is described baldly.”

Should the press have started calling Trump a liar earlier? Perhaps. I had no problem doing so in December 2015. But I wasn’t alone. The fact-checkers at FactCheck.org crowned Trump “The King of Whoppers’ the same month. PolitiFact awarded him “Lie of the Year” in 2015, 2017, and 2019. It’s worth mentioning that Trump’s capacity for lies increased as he settled into the White House, as the New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser reported in August 2018: Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler logged 2,140 false claims by President Trump in his first year but twice as many (4,229) in the six months of 2018 leading up to Glasser’s piece. By 2018’s end, Trump had become recognized as such a profligate liar that Kessler had to devise a new unit of measurement to describe Trump’s insistence on repeated single falsehoods again and again. To the previous measure of lies on a one-to-four Pinocchio scale, Kessler instituted The Bottomless Pinocchio.

Some critics insist that the press do more to denormalize candidates like Trump. Having made Trump synonymous with lying, deceiving and bigotry, that job has been largely accomplished. But the political landscape can’t be remade by mere denormalizing. The most horrifying thing about Trump’s constant lies is not that he convinces his supporters to accept them but that his supporters don’t care that much about whether he’s telling the truth as they do about his positions or affectations about the culture war, race, immigration, abortion, grievance, police, trade, guns and political elites. Trump knows that when he stretches the facts, the press will call him out on it. But he also knows that his supporters will perceive his falsehoods as symbolic truths and cheer. The press should continue its lie-spotting because it’s our mission, but critics like Sullivan are wrong to expect such vigilance to change every mind.

Sullivan correctly urges reporters to increase its coverage of “election deniers” who dishonestly preach about a “stolen” 2020 election. But that’s just sending a telegram the press got long ago. My New York Times feed is chockablock with election denial coverage. The same with the Washington Post. And the Los Angles Times. And the Wall Street Journal. It’s a great prescription but the patient has already taken the medicine.

She makes other suggestions worthy of our consideration for how to cover a Trump 2024 bid. She would prefer more “thoughtful framing and context” in coverage. Who can oppose that? Likewise, she counsels better quality control of headlines and news alerts to prevent the further dissemination of lies. Count me in. But her notions that the press should pay less attention to polls and staff blow-ups don’t reflect the way politics are waged. Polls drive fundraising and endorsements, both of which are key to winning votes which is the point of an election. To ignore them would be like ignoring the overture to a symphony. And a candidate’s ability to assemble a solid staff is a good stand-in for how they’ll perform in office. The backstabbing that occurred in the Trump campaign only grew fiercer when he arrived in the White House. It’s not mere gossip.

One critic of Trump coverage, the Atlantic’s George Packer, offers this suggestion for the media in 2024. “If Trump runs again, journalists would do better to follow the money that supports him. Report on the party that has come to embody him. Talk with the people who vote for him. Explore the conditions of their lives. Dig into the issues that move them. Trace the lies that beguile them.” But isn’t that precisely what the press pack has been doing since Trump reentered campaigning?

Packer adds a useful coverage suggestion in his kicker, writing that “when Trump says nothing new, ignore him.” But there’s evidence that the press is already doing so. His spurious Truth Social posts don’t get picked up the way his tweets once did, but then again, he’s not president now. Even New York University press scholar Jay Rosen, who loudly disdains the conventions of political reporting concedes that covering somebody like Trump is “not as simple as ‘don’t amplify.’” He continues, “There are occasions when the public needs to know that a political figure is falsifying reality, or that a consequential lie is gaining traction, as with Stop the Steal.”

None of this is to belittle those who implore the press to improve its game in 2024. As ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl put it succinctly last year, Trump presents unique challenges. “You’re covering essentially an anti-democratic candidate,” Karl said on Reliable Sources. “You’re covering somebody running in a system that is trying to undermine that very system.” But again, is there a newsroom in America that hasn’t internalized that lesson by now?

Reporters and editors should never reflexively bat away criticism. If Trump runs again in 2024, which looks likely, they’ll need as many back-seat drivers as they can get. But a genuine reckoning on how to cover Trump in 2024 must take an accurate inventory of the way we’ve actually covered him.

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Send your favorite Trump lie to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed has never told a lie. My RSS feed doesn’t even know what Morning Joe is.