Media Missing The Broader Context Of Trump's Lies
I know it’s hard for the media to keep track of and focus on all the lies and scandals coming out of the Trump administration. That is especially difficult because Trump is a master of feeding the media beast, knowing that not allowing it to focus on one issue for any sustained period makes all the lies and scandals just sound like background noise. Hillary Clinton, more than anyone, knows the damage that a daily media pounding on one relatively trivial issue can do. I also know that it’s not necessarily fair to single out one particular reporter or story as illustrative of the media at large. But in this case, I do think it is instructive in highlighting the media’s failure to truly understand the environment they are working in.
ThinkProgress has the story of Margaret Brennan’s interview with GOP Representative and head of the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows, on Face the Nation on Sunday. I know Face the Nation doesn’t have nearly the clout that it had before the emergence of cable and the internet. But, on the other hand, it is still one of CBS’ flagship news programs. So you would hope Ms. Brennan would actually be informed on the issues. Instead, she actually supported the totally false notion promoted by the President that there is a law that requires children to be separated from their families who cross the border illegally. Here is the entire exchange:
BRENNAN: I want to ask you as well about immigration because we could talk all day about the other topic. The president tweeted yesterday that it’s a horrible law to have parents separated from their children if they cross the border illegally. Do you agree it’s horrible?
REP. MEADOWS: Yeah I think it is a horrible law. It’s one of those that actually —
BRENNAN: Do you want to change it?
REP. MEADOWS: Actually, I think there is real bipartisan support for changing it. Here’s one of the interesting things. As we’ve been in these negotiations on trying to fix the immigration problem, this came out just the other day. I said I just can’t imagine that it’s the law, that you have to separate these individuals. Now obviously, human trafficking is a big deal, how do you know that they’re really parents and a family unit, so we would have to address that. But I think conservatives, moderates, and Democrats all agree that keeping a family together is the best strategy.
Of course, there is no such law. What has happened is that the Trump administration has changed its policy to treat every border crossing as a criminal act. Because of that change, the parents need to be immediately sent to criminal detention facilities. But children are not allowed in those facilities so they now have to be separated from the parents and are treated as unaccompanied minors, even if the children are only months old.
The disturbing part of this policy change is that it is intentionally designed to be cruel. As Jeff Sessions said, “We don’t want to separate families, but we don’t want families to come to the border illegally. This is just the way the world works.”
Now everyone makes mistakes and there have been plenty of media outlets that have reported the truth about Trump’s false claim that this law that forces separation of families actually exists. So this particularly egregious error on a flagship news program is not going to be the end of the world. But I do think it speaks to the real difficulties that responsible media organization have in avoiding simply becoming an unwitting mouthpiece for Trump propaganda.
This is deeper than simply the continual and ongoing discussion about whether to call Trump’s statements “lies” or “falsehoods” or “untruths” or “unconfirmed” or whatever. It is simply the fact that the President’s statements have to be reported at face value and then their validity gets vetted. But just the simple fact of reporting Trump’s initial false statement is all the amplification that he desires.
As I was writing this, Daniel Dale crystallized the point in a tweetstorm about Trump’s speech last night in Nashville. Writes Dale, “What I mean when I say a bigger issue than the lie-vs.-other-word debate is whether Trump’s extreme dishonesty gets covered at all: try to find a story on that rally that notes he said more than a dozen things that weren’t true, or just notes he was mostly detached from reality. His lies and other false claims get called out on Twitter a bit. And then the actual stories just quote him saying untrue things without correcting them, or pick out a newsworthy argument or attack without noting that the speech was dominated by unprecedented dishonesty. Trump’s unprecedentedly dishonest, unprecedentedly unfocused speeches are crammed into a normal-political-speech-article template, with any semblance of fact-checking relegated to a sidebar later in the week or not done at all. It Is Bad.”
Moreover, the fact that the mainstream media eventually gets around to calling his statements lies is meaningless to Trump and much of his supporters because they already believe that the mainstream media itself is full of lies. So, in the end, the media provides the amplification Trump desires without the context getting through to a significant portion of the public.
Part of this is certainly and simply the power of the bully pulpit. But part of it is also driven by the media cult of personality where the focus is more so on Trump than the actual policies carried out by his administration. And if Brennan and CBS had been focused on the actual policy issue of family separation at the border, they would have understood that it was the result of a change made by the Trump administration, a change made with stated intentional cruelty, and that there was no “law” requiring it. And the network would therefore not rely on Trump’s misleading tweet to describe the policy.
Of course, Brennan’s gaffe merely compounds the problem. The White House subsequently released a statement decrying the Democrats’ “catch and release” approach to immigration and Obama’s “open borders” policies. I guarantee there are numerous Trump supporters out there who will now say that Obama was purposely not enforcing the law and letting all these illegal immigrants into the country. If ever confronted, they will respond that they saw it reported on CBS so it must be true. And, as of Tuesday, neither the network nor the show has issued a correction for the false assertion that the law on separation exists.
The larger problem for the mainstream media, which Dale hints at, is that they are engaged in a war for the truth and the heart of our democracy, a fight against a rising tide of autocracy, but they don’t seem to realize the battle they are in. Trump and the Republican party now have a massive propaganda machine behind them in Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting, as well as the usual closed networks on social media. And, with Trump, we have a President who is only interested in feeding that propaganda machine and far less concerned with the traditional media. The story of how Trump’s lies fit into that larger story largely goes uncovered.
Yes, there are plenty of reporters and media outlets doing fantastic work uncovering the lies and corruption of this administration. It’s not that the media isn’t combatting Trump’s lies and propaganda, It’s that they are limited by a structure designed for a traditional approach to government and governing. The media still has their top reporters covering the White House briefing where Sarah Sanders simply lies to them all on a regular and repeated basis. As many have asked, is that the best use of those powerful resources?
As Dale notes, Trump’s mendaciousness is so all-pervasive, his disregard for facts is so all-encompassing, that the traditional methods of covering him simply do not work. They merely amplify his lies. The lede should always be that the President gave another unhinged speech full of lies, not regurgitating those lies and subsequently determining their lack of veracity.
Without a constant focus on that broader context, the media will find itself slowly but surely slipping into simply becoming another arm of the propaganda machine. It happened to Margaret Brennan and Face the Nation.
