Michael Wolff and Donald Trump

Michael Wolff, columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, recently sat down for an interview on CNN's media criticism show, Reliable Sources. It infuriated me.

Wolff begins by observing that the media "keeps losing to Trump." By what metric is this loss measured? Certainly not by popular opinion. Trump is the least popular new president since the advent of modern polling. The only metric I can think of to justify this statement is the extent to which Trump supporters have abandoned him in the face of media criticism. One of very few profoundly true statements that Trump has made in his brief political career is that "I could stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone and wouldn't lose any voters." Rhetorically exuberant perhaps, but it captures a real phenomenon. About 30% of the country's voters who constitute Trump's base are extremely loyal and seemingly unmovable in the face of negative information about their great leader. This has been true from the very beginning. It is difficult to see how the media is responsible for this. If anything, the media is responsible for Trump's incredibly high negatives. Even many who voted for him had a negative view of him.

Wolff said that when the media fact checks Trump, it helps him. Again, helps him with whom? Surely only with the aforementioned 'Go-ahead-and-shoot-someone-and-see-if-I-care' demographic. Again, this is hardly the media's fault. What is Wolff suggesting here? Is he suggesting that when Trump makes statements that are demonstrably false that the media should just ignore the statement and move on?

Wolff rejects David Remnick’s claim that the Trump administration poses an "emergency" for the media, other than the personal pique that members of the media find themselves in. Wolff displays what is surely willful ignorance regarding the nearly constant stream of falsehoods that come from Trump and those charged with representing him. One hardly needs to itemize these. It has been done by others many times. Trump's willingness to repeatedly make statements that are directly contradicted by easily checked evidence is unprecedented at the presidential level. Perhaps this is source of the feeling by some in the media that we are in a very different “emergency”environment that requires a different set of journalistic standards.

Wolff doesn’t know what "going easy on them [the Trump administration] means in this case". He merely plays the role of a fact finder, discovering "What do you think? What do you believe. Tell me."

The problem with this is two-fold. First, if all the media need do is serve as a vehicle of transmission for what politicians believe, then they are not acting as journalists. A journalist's job requires the ability to provide analysis of, context for, and fact checking of what those in power say. This has ALWAYS been the case. This job description has not been changed for Donald J. Trump. The only difference now is that the sheer volume of falsehoods emanating from Trump and his spokespersons requires the media to spend much more time than they are accustomed playing the role of truth referee. When Trump claims that he saw a video of thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey over 9/11, it is the media's job to say "No, you didn't, because no such video exists, because nothing like this occurred.” When Trump asserts that “You can’t believe what my people in Africa are finding” about Obama’s real birthplace, it is the media’s job to inform people that this is a racist lie. That’s not name-calling, it is a factual description.

The second problem with Wolff’s impoverished description of what the media ought to be doing regarding Trump is that it simply isn’t necessary. Trump and the seemingly ubiquitous Kellyanne Conway are not shy about telling the public what Trump believes and what he wants to do. In fact, the only mystery about Trump’s plans (which can often appear to change from day-to-day depending on whom he’s talking to) is how will he square the populism on which he ran with the Wall Street friendly, tax cuts for wealthy agenda that his administration at least initially seems to want to pursue. However, Wolff would presumably resist reporting even on this point as to do so would involve a implied criticism of his subject, which he seems to have ruled out in advance.

Wolff’s final comments border on the incoherent. When asked if he thought the Trump administration was unusual, his reply is that “all new presidencies are unusual”, which, as far as I can tell is an incredibly convoluted way of saying that the Trump administration is NOT unusual because it is like all the others.