Getty Fourth Estate Put on Your Big-Boy Pants, Journos President Trump’s lies don’t call for extraordinary media measures. Just do your jobs.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Extraordinary times—and we are living in an extraordinary time—do not necessarily call for extraordinary measures on the part of the press, as comforting as a full berserking might make many of us feel. The opening minutes of the Trump administration—the lies told by press secretary Sean Spicer about the size of the inauguration crowd, the president’s whopper at CIA headquarters claiming the media made up his feud with the agency, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway’s notion that “alternative facts” support Trump’s imaginary numbers—have stirred bladder-emptying panic among some in the press corps.

But the Trump administration cannot by itself pollute the river of truth with its bogus tweets, its press conferences in which no questions are allowed, or by Conway jibber jabber. Extraordinary times like these call for normal measures: The meticulous, aggressive, and calm presentation of the news. One of our examples should be the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold. Fahrenthold could have assessed the Trump candidacy by filling Twitter with angry comments or by setting himself on fire. Instead, as everybody knows, he excavated the self-dealing garbage dump that was the Trump Foundation as if he were an archeologist and published a series of patient stories that resulted in a penalty against the foundation and its planned closure.


Reporters tend to be emotional souls, which gives them an advantage when hauling a load of bricks up a ladder for their ungrateful, demanding editors and indifferent readers. Emotion fuels their sense of justice and motivates them to keep on keeping on. CNN’s Brian Stelter says he hears from readers that reporters should boycott Spicer’s press briefings in protest of his misrepresentations. Others, such as media scholar Jay Rosen, are stating that the press corps should perhaps think about avoiding interviews with Conway if all she’s going to do is contradict Trump rather than speak for him.

Boycotts and bans may fill a journalists’ heart with vengeance, or at least keep it from being bruised. But their maker designed reporters to be resilient, to take disparagement, derision, scorn, and sneering from lying government officials in stride. And for good reason. To quote from Jon Ronson once again, “It’s good for journalists to feel demeaned. It means we’re onto a story.” Rather than treat the Spicer, Trump, Conway ingenuities as an excuse to pout and leave the field, the experienced members of the press will be propelled by the weekend to pick up their mobiles and notebooks and go maximum Fahrenthold on the administration.

As I’ve hypothesized before, there is a method to Trump’s tweets. Whenever he finds the noose of news lowering over his thick orange neck, he takes to Twitter to change the subject. The more outrageous and self-serving (or should I say “self-dealing”?) the tweets are, the better his results.

On Saturday, the obvious news peg for the press was well-attended protests against his inauguration in Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and elsewhere in the world. So Trump sent his press secretary out to essentially speak one of his tweets by falsely stating that “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period” viewed the Trump event. In doing so, Trump-Spicer snipped the peak off of the protest coverage by making muddy what was clear about the audience size. To believe Spicer, you must accept that an invisible majority filled the Mall and that stealth supporters dressed as bleachers occupied those near-vacant grandstands along the parade route, and as you contemplate the truth value of his statement, you begin to forget about the massive scale of the anti-Trump protests.

Rather than tying itself up in knots over the Trump obfuscations, the press would be wiser to stop thinking of him as the outlier liar and the worst enemy the press has ever known and come to view him as a politician whose behavior is different only in degree, not in kind. Consider the Obama presidency. As former Politicos Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote in 2013 in a piece titled, “Obama, the Puppet Master,” he was “a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.” Obama didn’t camouflage the news with tweets or with shameless posturing in front of the CIA’s wall of martyrs as Trump did on Saturday, a move that caused former CIA Director John Brennan to growl in protest. Obama, VandeHei and Allen explained, took “old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting).” In doing so, “Media across the ideological spectrum [were] left scrambling for access.”

I don’t recall anybody calling for a boycott of Barack Obama or his myrmidons for his media scheming and for tipping the “balance of power between the White House and press … unmistakably toward the government,” as the Politico past-masters put it. The press mostly carried on, threading the thicket of treacheries as best it could. Governments always have and will always impede the press from doing their job, and they will use any means necessary. “All governments lie,” as journalist I.F. Stone once wrote, “but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” From my vantage, the Obama administration got Choom Gang stoned on their media pirouetting and the Trump administration seems to have come close to matching them in just a couple of days.

It is unseemly and counterproductive for journalists to sulk every time the Trump administration yanks their chain. Satisfying, yes, but unseemly and counterproductive. Because I believe in a multiverse of journalistic approaches, I would be the last person to ban moping among the press corps. Sometimes there’s nothing better than a long stay in the weeping room to embolden the beaten. But if you’re feeling whipped and you want my advice, ask yourself, “WWFD?”

“What Would Fahrenthold Do?”

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Well, Fahrenthold has become a part-time CNN contributor, something I’m not suggesting pressies do! Send Fahrentholdian advice to [email protected]. My email alerts owns a special sobbing towel, my Twitter feed hiccups when it cries, and my RSS feed grimaces like Charles Bronson whenever it hears a lie.