Silke Jasso
Some of us in The Media™ love to point out when Trump voters beg him to “act presidential,” or when Trump fulfills oft-repeated campaign promises that may actually hurt his own voters. Should’ve seen it coming, we say. You’ve been listening to the same interviews, reading the same headlines, watching the same rallies we are, and you voted for him.
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We ought to check ourselves. This weekend, almost all of us were doing the same thing.
This weekend, Press Secretary Sean Spicer stood in front of cameras to correct media reports about the size of the crowds at the Inauguration. It was his first such appearance in his capacity as Press Secretary. He repeated claims that this was, in fact, the “largest” inauguration “attended and watched,” even in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.
He excoriated the press for false and bad reporting, listing individual tweets he called “irresponsible” and “reckless.” Spicer’s statement was probably not his; it was read from the podium, delivered in the surly and confrontational tone more often associated with his boss.
Monday, Spicer pulled a virtual 180. He acknowledged the ornery nature of Saturday’s meeting, and delivered a briefing of over an hour that moved cleanly from issue to issue. It was a stark contrast to Saturday’s scolding that, while still generous with “alternative facts,” was closer to a real press conference.
On both days, Sean Spicer did his job. In our coverage, especially our reactions to Saturday’s scolding, we did not do ours.
Spicer is not, of course, the first to say something less-than-true from the podium. But that’s not said to normalize what was said and done on Saturday. On the Administration’s first full day, the Press Secretary of the President of the United States was arguing about a series of tweets, a demonstrably wrong claim, and a ground covering deployed by the National Park Service.
It was unprecedented, but not unpredictable.
Trump and his campaign targeted and harassed individual reporters by name and compiled a media blacklist. They starved outlets that they didn’t like and trained their fire towards reporters and organizations they deemed the “most unfair.” For inauguration week, members of the media were banned from Trump International in Washington DC.
This is how Trump and his team has acted for almost two years now. Their contentious relationship with the press hasn’t hurt them; in fact, it’s yielded wall-to-wall coverage.
Somewhat alarmingly (to us), the election of our newest president indicates that a whole lot of people agree. After 2016, we saw that Americans really don’t take a lot of reporting at face value, especially if it contradicts their worldview, and the same piece of information can be worth much less depending on where it appears. This hurts, but it’s where we are.
Trump and everyone in his orbit have succeeded in part on the motif that the media is biased and unhinged. Many of our responses on Saturday serviced that narrative better than he ever could.
Based on the content and conduct of his entire campaign, pressers like Saturday’s cannot be allowed to surprise us.
The best and most effective refutations of that press conference and the Administration’s “alternative facts” were the simplest. They used photographs of the Inauguration to plainly show that the White House Press Secretary spent an afternoon defending a lie (an absurd one, at that).
Such refutations are our only weapons against an administration that has already demonstrated a willingness to lie to every one of us. Trump’s campaign certainly did. It worked, too — the man who bragged about sexual assault on tape and then claimed “nobody has more respect for women than me” actually won a majority of white women voters by a substantial margin.
RELATED: D.C.’s Trump International Hotel has banned these people from the premises
President Trump is virtually the same as Donald Trump. There will be no “more presidential” version. Tweets posted since his election suggest that Trump will remain as vindictive as he was on the campaign trail. So it’s to be expected that any press arm of this Administration will work the same way.
Now we have something to work with: an Administration that we can assume will be run just like Trump’s prior decades in the public eye. To the opportunists among us, this White House is granting the opportunity to re-establish ourselves as the sane voice in the room.
But that begins by resisting the urge to panic. (Especially over crowd sizes. Let them do that.)
Right now, it’s on us to establish our respective outlets as places of stability, ones that acknowledge a duty to report on what’s said and done by the President of the United States, but fairly (and factually). Similarly, we have to confront the sick dependency that we’ve established with the Trump Administration. As long as we rely on them to make news, they will.
That affects our ability to report objectively and can make us look obsessed. Balance and sanity is most important right now, when it’s in short supply elsewhere.
Our jobs and reputations—not to mention our friends, family, and neighbors—are depending on it.
