Advice to the Press on Reporting on Trump - Good Read
Trump’s Caught the Press in His Narcissistic Web
Donald Trump loves to blame the press for chaos of his own making. His anger when the media accurately reports on his own rhetorical abuses has been the centerpiece of his presidency, but in recent weeks, the president has taken it to new heights. Just a day after a rabid anti-Semite massacred 11 mostly elderly Jewish worshippers in a synagogue, Trump tweeted, “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame.” The following Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders concluded her scheduled press briefing by telling the assembled reporters: “You guys have a huge responsibility to play in the divisive nature of this country, when 90 percent of the coverage of everything this president does is negative, despite the fact that the country is doing extremely well, despite the fact that the president is delivering on exactly what he said he was going to do if elected,” she said. “And he got elected by an overwhelming majority of 63 million Americans who came out and supported him, and wanted to see his policies enacted.” This attack on the press came with a gooey caramel center of lying (the president was not elected by an overwhelming majority of anyone: he lost the popular vote by 2.8 million).
Major news outlets scrambled again to “fact-check” and “debunk” an obvious lie. And journalists of all sorts went a little batshit, as is reasonable when blamed for a massacre of innocent elderly Jews. This Wednesday, the cycle repeated again when the White House revoked the press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta following the nastiest exchange between a president and a reporter in modern memory. The White House then fabricated a claim that Acosta had “put his hands” on a White House staffer, despite video evidence to the contrary. Journalists reacted in horror to the banishment, and the press became the story yet again.
Has the press really been too touchy in its responses to Trump’s attacks? Jon Stewart recently accused the media of being “narcissists” who always take the president’s bait for the wrong reasons. Says Stewart: “They take it personally. And now [Trump’s] changed the conversation to not that his policies are silly or not working or any of those other things; it’s all about the fight.” Ezra Klein, in a long meditation on the same problem, notes that Trump has just this one play: He demonizes and/or blames problems created by his own words and actions on the press.
Trump’s lust for media attention means that journalists are in a uniquely difficult position. They must keep telling the truth about what he does and says, but not on his terms, and not defensively. His tantrums deserve little spotlight and even less panelist punditry. The press should expect the calumnies that will come every day, week, and month until Trump is finally out of office. The only thing they can do to defang this “enemy of the people” claptrap is realize that it isn’t personal—for the malignant narcissist, nothing matters except himself—step off the causal loop, and refuse to play the narcissist’s boring game.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/trump-press-narcissism-psychology.html
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