Donald Trump’s
first solo press conference provided the bulk of material for
Thursday’s late-night hosts. Comedian’s ranging from Trevor Noah
to Seth Meyers reacted to the event while Jimmy Fallon impersonated
the president, who began by saying ‘You’re all fake news, I hate
you all very much and thank you for being here’
‘They will say,
Donald Trump rants and raves,’ the US president told reporters in a
blistering 77-minute question-and-answer session that covered Russia,
intelligence leaks, the firing of Michael Flynn, the electoral vote –
and uncomfortable encounters with reporters on the issues of
antisemitism and race.
Shooting
the messenger: how Trump's media vitriol could ultimately backfire
The
president’s belligerent approach to the press may distract from
problems in the short term, experts say, but history shows such
hostility can end badly
Lucia Graves
@lucia_graves
Friday 17 February
2017 18.32 GMT
Though it was
ostensibly called to announce his new nominee for the Department of
Labor, Donald Trump’s 77-minute freewheeling press conference on
Thursday spent little time on the matter.
Instead, speaking to
a room of reporters who repeatedly sought to clarify when and if
Trump staffers had had contact with Russians, he recast the event as
a referendum on reporters everywhere.
The president
claimed that the media served not the people but “special
interests”, reaping profits from a rigged system, and he sought to
tar the press as universally untrustworthy. “The press has become
so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it we are doing a
tremendous disservice to the American people. The press are out of
control. The level of dishonesty is out of control,” he said.
He launched
aggressive broadsides at individual journalists, as when Trump asked
black journalist April Ryan if she would schedule a meeting with the
Congressional Black Caucus for him. “Are they friends of yours?”
he said.
And Trump referred
to the media as an entrenched “power structure” and vowed to go
around it entirely. “We’re not going to let it happen. I’m here
again to take my message straight to the people,” he said.
“This level of
public vitriol directed at the news media by the president is
unprecedented in American history,” said Mark Feldstein, a former
CNN correspondent and professor of journalism at the University of
Maryland.
“No president has
ever declared war and given such loud voice to that unhappiness in
his very first week. Actually, his very first day,” said George
Condon, a former president of the White House Correspondents
Association who spent a career covering presidents.
Trump’s White
House has been off to a rocky start. Less than a month into his
tenure, during what is traditionally a honeymoon period, Trump has
the lowest approval ratings of any recent president at this point.
His former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is the
shortest-serving in history after being forced out following an
inappropriate discussion with the Russian ambassador. And Trump’s
cabinet is one of the slowest to be filled in history.
Trump is blaming the
media for these failings as the bearer of bad news, not its creator,
said Frank Sesno, a veteran former journalist who runs the School of
Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
“It is not the
media that made the call to the Russians. It is not the media that
apparently lied to the vice-president. It is not the media that
prompted six Republicans to tank the labor secretary nominee. It’s
not the media that ruled against the immigration ban,” Sesno said.
“Instead, he’s isolating, accusing, distracting, demonizing and
blaming others.”
“The media is the
messenger and what we saw … is he’s willing to try to discredit
them by any means necessary,” said the Dartmouth political science
professor Brendan Nyhan, who studies the interaction of politics and
the media.
The American fourth
estate has endured through difficult moments.
Sedition acts passed
under presidents John Adams in the late 18th century and Woodrow
Wilson in the early 20th made it a criminal offense to criticize the
government.
But these situations
– the instability of the nascent American government and world war,
respectively – are without parallel in modern times. And neither
president ever stooped to publicly attacking the press the way Trump
does, Feldstein said. “They did not seem obsessed with the issue.
They viewed these as emergency measures that were necessary to
protect national security.”
Feldstein, who wrote
the book on Richard Nixon’s toxic relationship with the press, said
Trump should see a warning in Nixon, who similarly treated the press
with contempt. “That gained him some mileage when running for
office and appealed to the Republican party at the time,” said
Feldstein. “But ultimately he was impaled on that kind of paranoid
bunker mentality and I think Trump risks the same happening to him.”
Trump’s hostility
toward the press did not start with his inauguration. As a candidate,
he held the media in pens during his rallies, urged supporters to boo
reporters, threatened to “open up” libel laws to make it easier
to sue journalists,
and regularly banned
entire outlets from his events on a whim.
But the “pivot”
pundits predicted when Trump became president has yet to materialize
, even after he took the oath of office last month.
Trump’s media
obsession is often dismissed as a sign of his poor temperament. But
it’s also a political strategy that allows him to change the
subject of debate from one of substance to matters of tribal
allegiance, according to Nyhan.
“This is the
conversation Trump wants to have,” said Nyhan. “There is a method
to his madness.”
Trump’s
re-election campaign even fundraised using the press conference,
telling supporters in an email that they were the “last line of
defense” against the media.
People tell
pollsters that they hate Congress but keep re-electing their
individual representatives, and the same can be said of journalism.
People hate “the media ”, but are loyal to individual outlets and
reporters.
By taking on the
media as a whole, Nyhan note d, Trump has a built-in advantage – an
individual versus a unpopular institution.
“It’s a massive
problem that I don’t think we’re really grasping with as an
institution,” said a White House reporter who declined to be named
out of fear of retribution from Trump officials.
So how can
journalists respond?
According to Sesno,
the former CNN anchor turned academic, journalists need to do a
better job of explaining their value and process.
For instance, Trump
has painted leakers as vile and unpatriotic. But the press should
also defend them as whistleblowers who help hold government
accountable. “How do we explain that leaks are part of the process
of both journalism and democracy?” he said.
It also means
stepping back and admitting some of journalism’s problems, Sesno
said, such as elitism and a lack of connection with, for instance,
rural white working-class voters.
Feldstein thought
there was reason for Trump to reconsider his strategy, too. To
explain, he cited the old adage : “Never pick a fight with people
who buy ink by the barrel.”
“Ultimately the
media does have the last word,” Feldstein said, “including
literally writing his obituary when he dies. So there are long-term
costs he will face for his approach.”
McCain
savages Trump administration and inability to 'separate truth from
lies'
Republican
senator uses Munich speech to reflect on ‘disarray’ in Trump
White house, saying president contradicts himself
Staff and agencies
Saturday 18 February
2017 02.31 GMT
John McCain said on
Friday that Donald Trump’s administration was in “disarray” and
that Nato’s founders would be alarmed by the growing unwillingness
to “separate truth from lies”.
The Republican
Senator broke with the reassuring message that US officials visiting
Germany have sought to convey on their debut trip to Europe, telling
a Munich security conference the resignation of the new president’s
security adviser, Michael Flynn, over his contacts with Russia
reflected deep problems in Washington.
“I think that the
Flynn issue obviously is something that shows that in many respects
this administration is in disarray and they’ve got a lot of work to
do,” said McCain, a known Trump critic, even as he praised Trump’s
defence secretary. “The president, I think, makes statements [and]
on other occasions contradicts himself. So we’ve learned to watch
what the president does as opposed to what he says,” he said.
Without mentioning
the president’s name, McCain lamented a shift in the US and Europe
away from the “universal values” that forged the Nato alliance
seven decades ago. McCain also said the alliance’s founders would
be “alarmed by the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to
separate truth from lies.”
The chairman of the
Armed Services Committee, said “more and more of our fellow
citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticising
it as our moral equivalent”. The senator also regretted the
“hardening resentment we see toward immigrants, and refugees, and
minority groups, especially Muslims”.
European governments
have been unsettled by the signals sent by Trump on a range of
foreign policy issues ranging from Nato and Russia to Iran, Israel
and European integration.
The debut trip to
Europe of Trump’s defence secretary, Jim Mattis, and his secretary
of state, Rex Tillerson, to a meeting of G20 counterparts in Bonn,
went some way to assuaging concerns as they both took a more
traditional US position.
But Trump is
wrestling with a growing controversy at home about potential ties
between his aides and Russia, which he dismissed on Thursday as a
“ruse” and “scam” perpetrated by a hostile news media.
Mattis made clear to
allies, both at Nato in Brussels and in Munich, that the US would not
retreat from leadership as the European continent grapples with an
assertive Russia, wars in eastern and southern Mediterranean
countries and attacks by Islamist militants.
US vice-president
Mike Pence will address the Munich conference on Saturday with a
similar message of reassurance. Pence will say Europe is an
“indispensable partner”, a senior White House foreign policy
adviser told reporters.
Mattis told a crowd
that included heads of state and more than 70 defence ministers that
Trump backed Nato. “President Trump came into office and has thrown
now his full support to Nato. He too espouses Nato’s need to adapt
to today’s strategic situation for it to remain credible, capable
and relevant,” Mattis said.
Mattis said the US
and its European allies had a shared understanding of the challenges
ahead. Trump has alarmed allies by expressing admiration for Russian
president Vladimir Putin.
Mattis, however, has
spoken out strongly against Russia while in Europe. After talks with
Nato allies in Brussels on Thursday, he said he did not believe it
would be possible to collaborate militarily with Moscow, at least for
now.
The Europeans may
need more convincing that Washington stands with it on a range of
security issues. “There is still a lot of uncertainty,” Sebastian
Kurz, Austria’s foreign minister, told reporters. “The big topic
in Munich is looking to the USA to see which developments to expect
next.”
European
intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is also seeking to
destabilise governments and influence elections across Europe with
cyber attacks, fake news and propaganda and by funding far-right
political parties.
British defence
minister Michael Fallon said: “We should be under no illusions
about the step-change in Russian behaviour over the last couple of
years, even after Crimea”, referring to Moscow’s 2014 annexation
of the Ukrainian peninsula.
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“We have seen a
step-change in Russian military aggression, but also in propaganda,
in misinformation and a succession of persistent attacks on western
democracies, interference in a whole series of elections including
... the United States.”
Nato’s
secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, held talks with Russian foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov in Munich, seeing progress on encouraging
Moscow to be more open about its military exercises that the alliance
says are unpredictable.
Russia says it is
the western alliance, not Moscow, that is destabilising Europe by
sending troops to its western borders. “We have different views,”
Stoltenberg said of the crisis in Ukraine, where the west accuses the
Kremlin of arming separatist rebels in a conflict that has killed
10,000 people since April 2014. Russia says the conflict is a civil
war.
Reuters and
Associated Press contributed to this report
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