Sunday, February 26, 2017

Trump vs. Press: Crazy, Stupid Love

NY Times  by Maureen Dowd

Much has been made of Melania Trump’s absence from the capital.

But our new president’s most intense, primal, torrid relationship is in full “The War of the Roses” bloom here. And it is not with his beautiful, reserved wife. It’s with the press, the mirror for the First Narcissus.

President Trump thinks that the mirror is cracked and the coverage is “fake.” And many in the press, spanning the ideological spectrum, think that he is cracked and that a lot of his pronouncements are fake.

Can this strange, symbiotic relationship be saved? Probably not. It is too inflamed and enmeshed, too full of passionate accusations. It’s going to end like all those plays and movies — from “Othello” to “Endless Love” — where the mutual attraction is so powerful, it’s toxic.

Trump could not live without the press. It is his crack. He would be adrift and bereft without his sparring partners, lightning rods, scapegoats and amplifiers.

And while many in the press may disdain the way Trump uses them to rile up crowds and deflect from transgressions, they know they have a rare story and a tantalizing, antagonizing protagonist.

As the New York Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted in January: “Trump has frequently complained about my reporting,” yet, “He remains the most accessible politician I’ve ever covered.”

The press is everything to Donald Trump, from interior décor — his Trump Tower office was plastered wall to wall with framed magazine covers reflecting his face back at him like an infinity mirror — to daily reading. For decades every morning, he had his assistant print out a sheaf of stories published about him and keep a store of videotapes for ego gratification. Once Trump became a Twitter addict, this morphed into an incestuous, vertiginous spiral, as he got upset and shot back against news reports he did not like.

His campaign staff “cracked the code for tamping down his most inflammatory tweets,” Tara Palmeri reported in Politico last week, by ensuring “his personal media consumption includes a steady stream of praise. And when no such praise was to be found, staff would turn to friendly outlets to drum some up — and make sure it made its way to Trump’s desk.”

Talk about fake news.

He is the biggest story on the planet, “King Lear meets Rodney Dangerfield,” as Lloyd Grove tweeted after Trump’s recent press conference. As our new president is well aware, he’s a rainmaker and a troublemaker for media.

Financially pressed news organizations are not being shy about seizing the moment to celebrate — and cash in on — their aggressive independence. They are responding with a missionary zeal to being treated as “the opposition party” that “should keep its mouth shut,” as Trump enforcer Steve Bannon put it.[...]

It doesn’t seem to have sunk in with Trump that he can’t manipulate the press as easily today. He’s the president. When he exaggerates and makes things up now, it has global consequences and subverts American values. It is not like whispering lies about which famous women are panting for him.

In his pouty speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, he reiterated his sour denunciation of journalists as “the enemy of the people.” The man who made his flashy reputation by being an anonymous and pseudonymous source — and who still spews a constant stream of wild assertions based on anonymous sources — blustered that the press “shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name.”

The White House has been trying to shape coverage by giving passes and questions at press conferences to Breitbart and other conservative outlets, including some fringe ones. And on Friday afternoon, the White House barred several news organizations from a Sean Spicer briefing. This included The New York Times and CNN, which angered the White House by reporting on links between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials.

This Russian-style domination of the press came only a few hours after the president told CPAC: “I love the First Amendment; nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”

Fake news. Let’s just hope he doesn’t love the First Amendment to death.

22 comments :

  1. Most of the news is fake.... made up of opinions, bias, agendas & secret wishes. Trump is not far off-base.

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  2. Most of reality is misunderstood - the mental hospitals are full of people who are not so far off base

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  3. Most of the news, seriously? Fake news exists, but in Trump's world fake news is simply news that he doesn't like or which points out his innumerable lies. You have totally bought into the destructive propaganda of the Trump presidency. The press is our best guarantee of free speech, against fascism and dictators. Wake up.

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  4. The First 100 Lies: The Trump Team’s Flurry Of Falsehoods (aka Lies)

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-administration-lies-100_us_58ac7a0fe4b02a1e7dac3ca6?

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  5. Wow. Maureen Dowd. That's really the bottom of the barrel.

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  6. There are certain things that the mainstream media by-and-large won't say. It's a kind of "surrounding the wagons" approach. The big media recognize their power and are afraid of reporting honestly on certain topics because it might be the leak in the dike that gets the public fired up. Or because it won't help the reporter's career. And just will get him fired.

    We had an example on this blog recently. There was a reporter who lived in Eretz Yisrael. When he realized that he and his family were in danger, he woke up to the truth. The story finished with his returning to the U.S. and grappling with how to keep both his integrity and career intact at the same time.

    So there's fake news which is fake on its face. And fake news because of what it leaves out.

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  7. May I add something? A lot of the planet is populated by people who don't have a strong hold on reality. Trump has the ability to talk to these people on their own terms. That's the secret to his popularity. On the other hand, he has a solid security team, to allay fears he's actually bought into the conspiracies.

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  8. Really? According to their very own numbers, only 52% of people trust them. several other polls have it at below 50%. If you want to blame the media's trustworthy problem on Trump, then it is you who has bought into propaganda.

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  9. Do you think that the 40-55 % of the country who does not trust the media are insane and should be institutionalized?

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  10. I agree that news is over-rated, but actually fake?!

    Let's look at this with the help of analogy:
    "Most" overheards & relayed information are short of being completely accurate. Is the logical response to disregard everything we're told?
    Weather prediction has a pretty miserable record, considered in absolute terms. (No one would invest their savings based cosmologists' typical accuracy.) Yet how many of us cast aspersion on weather reports, or even disregard them?

    Something amiss in this logic, no? I'm inclined to agree with zach: it reeks agenda -- i.e., of being propaganda.

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  11. And their is fake news where Trump makes up facys and is followers view it as Truth

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  12. But it would be impossible to institutionalize 40-55% of this country.

    Any other options on how to save people from themselves? You know, it's definitely only for their own well-being!

    Wait: I got it! Let's fudge the facts a bit for the better good of the people.
    Oops, I'm just plagiarizing; people have already come up with this idea before me! In fact, that's why the media is distrusted; because they're fudging the facts!

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  13. Obviously it is impossible and obviously it is not desirable. But it is obviously a serious problem that a significant part of the population is post-Truth - including the President

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  14. Obviously democracy is a problem, according to this. Why shouldn't we just have the responsible NYT et al help hide the facts and have people elect the strong and dictatorial leaders?

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  15. Why the New York Times? - Trump is doing a great job at concealing the facts by himself and since Trump considers the NYT the enemy of the people - I am sure he would not want to share the glory of telling lies with them

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  16. Because the NYT has a very long history of doing this. Leading up to and during WWII they presented Hitler as a reasonable and sensible person who had legitimate grievances. They refused to publish what the Nazis were doing to our brethren. On the rare occasion that they did run a small story, it was hurried on page 17. From then and until today, they haven't changed their policies. They are an extremely biased entity that covers what they feel is good for society. They even boasted that they were responsible for a war circa 1917. I have to look it up...

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  17. I don't think I consider it "Truth" with a capital "T". I just go along with it so that the greater goal can be achieved. After all, this is politics, not high school debating class. American politics is part theater, part wars of persuasion, and part truth. No one ever claimed otherwise, and any unbiased observer would conclude the same.

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  18. Didn't hear Trump say NYT was the enemy until they started reporting the facts about him. Why is it only fake news when the subject is Trump but not other topics?

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  19. President George W. Bush once quoted the NYT from during WWII. He then concluded that it seems that the NYT still has the same editors. Just remember that President Bush usually did not defend himself, as he felt that he would be lowering the office of the presidency. You are conveniently forgetting how many times the NYT compared him to Hitler. This is very old. It just got worse over the past 12 years.

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  20. Even though Trumpians don't really care what traditional (real) conservatives have to say, here is what Former President G. W. Bush has to say about Trump's presidency so far:

    https://youtu.be/hHBkCq5Tmso

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