Reporter's journal: In Trump era, views of media — like politics — are polarized

Tavern owner Kim Carlson has a handy rule for cutting through the maze and haze of political news these days.

“You read a bunch of it, then believe half,” she said with a laugh.

That’s one way of processing the news. I’ve heard dozens of others since I started roaming around Wisconsin last fall talking to voters amid the tumult of Donald Trump’s presidency.

In the Trump era, conversations about politics often turn into conversations about the media, and they reflect how splintered and polarized our information culture has become.

“We have not watched any mainstream media for over a year. … It’s Fox all the time,” said Vickie Krueger, a Republican from Fond du Lac, interviewed at a home show in West Bend.

“We don’t listen to Fox News, so we know we’re actually getting something that’s akin to the truth,” said Christopher Smith, a Democrat from Gays Mills, interviewed at a winter festival in Cedarburg.

One by-product of a pervasive yet balkanized news culture is a crush of information but with fewer shared sources. Everyone has their own media preferences, their own system of sifting facts and their own appetite for news, ranging from “I can’t get enough” to “I can’t take anymore.”

People are divided over information itself, a trend fed by the rise of partisan media on all sides and by a president who utterly dominates the news, clashes with journalists, gets lots of negative coverage and declares as "fake" things that are provably true.

When Mary Gapko, a Democratic voter in Racine, wanted to know about my politics, I told her, "I don’t really take sides." She later rephrased the question.

“What do you watch?’ she asked. “CNN? Fox?”

As a member of the media reporting on the politics of a battleground state, I’ve buttonholed people at their doors, bars, churches, bowling alleys, schools, home shows, gun ranges, parades and coffee klatches over the past six months. They’ve greeted me with warmth, gratitude, curiosity, skepticism and mistrust (though almost never outright hostility).

The relationship between Trump and the media comes up all the time.

The most biting critique of the news culture I’ve heard came from a conservative pastor who gave me more than an hour of his time, despite his contempt for an “established media” he views as “corrupt and incapable of benefiting the American people.”

“It’s the dishonesty,” said Mike Breininger of the Richland Center Fellowship. “I don’t mind if they slant it, just be honest about it. Don’t pretend like you’re putting out the truth here. Just say, ‘This is my opinion. I hate Trump. I’m writing an article based on hating Trump, so here it is.’ I can take that! But to say, ‘I’m just a journalist reporting the way things are and Donald Trump is a slimy, no-good, lying dog who deserves to be impeached’ — oh, that sounds pretty impartial and journalistic to me,” he said sarcastically.

The strongest defense of the media I’ve heard came in a conversation a few miles away with Dan Anderson, who repairs chainsaws at his farm in bellwether Richland County, which has voted for every winning president since 1980. I walked in unannounced to his saw shop and spent the morning talking to him and his customers about politics and guns and trade and taxes. When I told Anderson that I worked in Washington, D.C., I assumed it would create more distance between us, but it had the opposite effect.

“Just think how fortunate we are, having a guy from Milwaukee who’s been in Washington, D.C., sitting here talking to us guys in a little shop in Wisconsin. I mean, how fortunate can we be, boys?” he told the guys in his shop, with complete sincerity.

“You know what a dictator wants to do? He doesn’t want him (meaning me) to come out here and talk to us,” Anderson said. “Trump sits there and knocks down the free press, which sometimes you don’t always agree with, but it’s better to have the free press out there digging around — maybe come up with some information once in a while that ain’t right — but I’d just as soon have them out there doing it.” Before I left, Anderson told me, “You made my day.”

The nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported last year the biggest gap ever between Republicans and Democrats over the media’s role as political “watchdog:” Almost 90% of Democrats said criticism from news organizations keeps politicians from doing things they shouldn’t do; only 42% of Republicans agreed. In a Wisconsin survey last year by the Marquette Law School, 80% of Democrats said they were more likely to believe facts presented by newspaper and television media than facts presented by elected politicians; only 34% of Republicans agreed.

For Smith, the Democrat in Gays Mills, tensions between Trump and the press only reinforce his view that the media is a bulwark of democracy.

“I think it’s heinous (Trump) disparages the media. It’s the only thing that keeps us from turning into, let’s say, Russia,” said Smith.

For many Trump voters, those tensions have the opposite effect. They feed their view that the media is unrelentingly hostile to Trump. One local GOP official, who was not a big Trump fan, complained to me that network news is an “I-hate-Trump Fest for 30 minutes.”

When I asked Tom Harder of Grafton what changes he’d like to see in the political culture, he replied, “Changes in you guys.”

“You guys are supposed to be independent instead of so lopsided,” he said. “You’ve got basically Fox all by itself over here, and then how many other hundreds of organizations on (the other) side? There is no balance to the scales whatsoever.”

Today’s media is so diverse in its mission, style and point of view that there is something for everyone to hate (or like). But the mistrust of the “mainstream media” on the right has reached a point where it is reinforced by practically everything that happens in the Trump presidency, said Dhavan Shah, a professor of mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

It’s reinforced when Trump attacks the media, attacks which are heavily reported. And it’s reinforced whenever Trump says or does things that attract negative coverage, which is very, very often. Studies have shown Trump’s coverage is more negative than that of his predecessors. Critics view that as deserved, supporters as unfair. But either way, the adversarial relationship between Trump and many news outlets puts the media in a place where most traditional journalists don’t like to be, which is “too much a part of the story,” said Shah.

The latest flashpoint in that saga came with Saturday’s annual White House Correspondents Dinner when a comic’s roast of Trump and members of his team ignited controversy.

In a national poll by Quinnipiac, about six in 10 voters disapproved of the way the news media covers Trump, and about six in 10 disapproved of the way Trump talks about the media.

Some frustrations with the news cross political lines. I’ve talked to voters of all stripes who think the president’s personality, style and behavior so dominate the coverage of politics that it crowds out important issues.

“I’ve turned the radio off, so to speak. My commute is about 40 minutes, morning and night. I am so tired of not finding out what the real issues (are),” said Howard Kaney, a Republican-leaning voter from Newburg. “We’re focusing on tweets and short-term issues, so I keep searching for areas of information on what’s the real effect, long-term. It’s easy to cry bias. I am not sure I buy that. … It’s, ‘what are the real issues?’”

Asked how he would like to see Trump’s most provocative tweets covered, Daniel Sevcik told me, “Ignore it.”

“My grandmother said you only make a turd worse by mulling it,” he said, meaning turning it over and over.

Some voters flinch at the perpetual tone of alarm and sense of crisis they detect in the coverage of Trump, or in Trump’s own words on his Twitter account.

“Everything is not ‘obscene’ or ‘ridiculous.’ The world is not going to fall off,” said Sevcik.

“Everything is (treated like) a crisis, and it’s really not a crisis. It will be worked out,” said Mark Zeugner, from the city of Waukesha. “You just have to kind of take everything with a grain of salt.”

Today’s political and media culture is fragmented, polarized, pervasive and interconnected all at once, said Shah, the media scholar.

“It becomes stultifying,” he said. “You can have one of two reactions: either get more and more aggrieved and frustrated and angry, or you become exhausted.”

One man told me he can’t sleep after watching the news. Another told me his wife’s way of controlling the cacophony is to tune it out completely, to the point where major news events pass her by. When he mentioned the Feb. 14 Florida school massacre a day and a half after it occurred, she asked him, “What happened?”

“There are more and more days when you don’t even want to turn the news on or even read the paper. You just want to turn social media off and just have a day without that. It would be great for everyone,” said Dan Myers, who sells pontoon boats in Waukesha County.

“It can be a headache to listen to. You fill your brain up with jelly, like a jelly doughnut, with crap you read on Facebook,” said Ryan Perrault of Milwaukee.

Not everyone is tuning out, or freaking out. Many people I’ve talked to say they’re just trying to be educated, skeptical citizens.

“I am not unhappy with the media, no. I don’t trust them either. I’m old enough to know you can manipulate the press just as easily as you can manipulate politicians,” said Carlien Winn, a Democratic voter in Racine.

Not everyone is living in a cloistered information echo chamber, either. Many people told me they actively seek out news from across the political spectrum.

“I feel in order to get an educated opinion you’ve got to listen to both sides … and then from there you formulate your own idea,” said Perrault. “If you listen to Tucker Carlson on Fox News, it’s like Trump’s the best guy ever, and then if you turn on CNN, it’s the very opposite end of the spectrum. … How do you get a media source that’s right down the middle, because nobody’s going to want to fund them.”

Steve Schweiss, interviewed at the annual Waukesha Rotary pancake festival, said he listens to talk radio on the right and “Resistance Radio” on the left.

“It behooves the average person to get as much information as possible,” he said. “It’s not that you can’t trust the media — sorry, no disrespect — but if you read something, learn more about it.”

That polite aside — “sorry, no disrespect” — was also typical of my interactions with the voters I’ve approached over the months. Those interactions have been overwhelmingly civil, despite the discord over Trump and the media.

Some people — not many — refused to be interviewed. Others held back until they formed an impression of me. Many opened themselves up at great length. A group of mostly retired men who meet for coffee every weekday morning at a bar in Mauston let me listen in and record their freewheeling gab fest, which took a considerable amount of trust. Many people who expressed deep distrust of the mainstream media still agreed to be interviewed with the faith or hope they wouldn’t be misquoted or cast in an unfair light. Some invited me into their homes.

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When I was going house to house in Racine last December, retiree Jerry Ruud took one look at me at his door and said, “You used to be on Charlie Sykes.” He was referring to regular appearances I had made as a political reporter more than 20 years earlier on conservative talk radio and a Sunday TV show in Milwaukee.

“I was, years ago,” I said.

“You’re a liberal,” he said disapprovingly.

“I’m a reporter,” I said. On the Sykes show, I was often the only panelist who wasn’t a conservative commentator or Republican politician.

To Ruud, I was "the other side," as he put it.

I thought he might end the interview before it began. But he didn’t shut the door. Instead, he spoke very affably with me for the next 15 minutes, beginning with the question every reporter loves to hear.

“What do you want to know?” he said.