Ariana Maia Sawyer

USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee

Reporters have to make some changes in the way they're covering President Donald Trump and his administration's tendency to stray from the facts, a panel of scholars and journalism experts agreed Wednesday evening.

Fact checkers have covered every speech and debate, hurrying to correct Trump's exaggerations or lies on a wide range of topics, including unemployment levels, crime rates, immigration and non-existent terrorist attacks.

But David Von Drehle, TIME Magazine editor-at-large, said that by trying to catch the president's every mistake, reporters are setting themselves up for failure when they mess up too.

"It allows the people who want to believe him a way to say he’s no worse than they are," he said. "We know we will make mistakes."

He cited the case of the relocated bust, when a TIME reporter tweeted that the president appeared to have replaced the visage of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oval Office, with one of Winston Churchill. The King bust had only been moved, not replaced, the White House fired back. The reporter issued a swift correction.

Instead, he said, reporters should focus on deeper policy stories.

Von Drehle, who wrote the cover story profiles of Trump and Steve Bannon, spoke at the John Seigenthaler First Amendment Center along with David Maraniss, a Washington Post associate editor and Vanderbilt University visiting professor, and Vanderbilt University Associate Dean of Students Frank E. Dobson Jr.

John M. Seigenthaler, a successful journalist in his own right, moderated the panel. He most recently served as an anchor on NBC Nightly News and Al Jazeera America. His late father founded the center and is considered a legendary newsman in Tennessee and elsewhere. The event, called "The Search for Truth in the Trump Era," was the first installment of "The Seigenthaler Conversations."

“The whole sort of direction of the mainstream media the last month has been to take it seriously and to call him on every single tweet and every statement he makes," Maraniss said. "It’s an endless cycle."

He said it's hard to ignore the president of the United States when he speaks.

Dobson, who is not a journalist, said he turns the television off for long periods of time to avoid the non-stop coverage. He feels that Trump is playing the media and winning.

"He’s a snake oil salesman," Dobson said. "He’s giving (people) these notions of wealth and prosperity that he obviously can’t deliver on, but that they’re searching for and seeking.”

Von Drehle remembered traveling with the Trump team during the campaign on "Trump Force One." After taking off and reaching a cruising altitude, a large wall-sized TV turned on and Trump began flipping through the channels. Every person was talking about him.

"Ratings are power," Von Drehle remembers Tump saying to him at the time.

And the new president knows how to get them.

"He can change our agenda in 140 characters, on a dime," Von Drehle said. "We can be talking about something he doesn’t want us to talk about and he can, BOOM, change it with the push of a button."

A few of the panelists called the election, attacks on the press and a long-term media credibility problem a wake up call. A 2016 Gallup poll shows Americans have been losing faith in mass media overall somewhat steadily since 2005, but news subscription surges since Trump's election may be an opportunity to make amends.

Von Drehle said journalists should spend more time tackling the major factual errors at the policy level and not in "some smart-alecky fact check," recommending a "lies of the week" feature rather than jumping on every erroneous tweet.

Reach Ariana Sawyer at asawyer@tennessean.com or on Twitter @a_maia_sawyer.