Getty Fourth Estate Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again In his own way, Trump has set us free.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Donald Trump and his forthcoming presidency may be the greatest gift to Washington journalism since the invention of the expense account. His unorthodox approach to politics and governance has vaporized the standard, useful, yet boring script for reporting on a new administration’s doings. At his news conference last week, Trump began the process of washing the press completely out of his fake hair as he castigated CNN and BuzzFeed for reporting on the oppo-research dossier compiled on him. “Fake news,” said the man who has appeared on InfoWars and commended the outlet’s efforts.

Trump’s surrogate Newt Gingrich took to Sean Hannity’s program on Fox to assist in the maiming of the media. Trump and his team “need to go out there and understand they have it in their power to set the terms of this dialogue,” Gingrich said on the Jan. 11 episode. “They can close down the elite press.” Next up came Reince Priebus’ announcement that Trump might evict the presidential press corps from the White House for lesser lodging in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building, and Sean Spicer’s admonition that reporters “adhere to a high level of decorum at press briefings and press conferences,” according to a readout of his two-hour summit with the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association. (Or else what, one wonders?)


Now, before the Committee to Protect Journalists throws up the batsign and the rest of us bemoan Trump’s actions as anti-press—which they are—let’s thank the incoming president for simplifying our mission. If Trump’s idea of a news conference is to spank the press, if his lieutenants believe the press needs shutting down, if his chief of staff wants to speculate about moving the White House press scrum off the premises, perhaps reporters ought to take the hint and prepare to cover his administration on their own terms. Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting, the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a matter of life or death.

In his own way, Trump has set us free. Reporters must treat Inauguration Day as a kind of Liberation Day to explore news outside the usual Washington circles. He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines.

Washington reporting has long depended on a transactional relationship between sources and journalists. Journalists groom sources, but sources also groom journalists. There’s nothing inherently unethical about the back-scratching. When a reporter calls an administration source to confirm an embarrassing item, the source may agree to confirm as long as the reporter at the very least agrees to listen sympathetically to the administration’s context. But Trump’s hostile attitude toward the press, his dismissal of CNN for attempting to ask a question at the last conference, and his underhanded ploy at the last conference where he loaded the audience with cheerleaders has muted that mutualism. It’s easy to predict that instead of negotiating with reporters as equals, his administration will advance its agenda by feeding more pliant reporters material the way a trainer rewards circus animals.

The press has already started to prepare itself for such a Trumpian lockout by pursuing news angles that rely less on official access than usual. At the Washington Post, the newspaper has assembled a team that includes the much-lauded foundation-buster David Fahrenthold to investigate Trump’s business dealings and conflicts of interest and potential violations of the Emoluments Clause. The Wall Street Journal just explored how Trump’s debt to more than 150 financial institutions (more than $1.5 billion than he has admitted to in disclosure forms) may create potential conflicts of interest for him.

Opportunities to ignore the White House minders and investigate Trump announce themselves almost daily. For instance, the load-bearing walls of the Office of Government Ethics are groaning with the weight of filings by his appointees, as the New York Times reported earlier this month. Trump has installed the “wealthiest cabinet in modern American history,” the Times says. Its website has already crashed from public queries and the OGE director has denounced the Trump plan to avoid conflict of interest as “wholly inadequate.” Reporters will be mining these forms for months and producing damaging results without any Trump administration confirmation or cooperation.

As Trump shuts down White House access to reporters, they will infest the departments and agencies around town that the president has peeved. The intelligence establishment, which Trump has deprecated over the issue of Russian hacking, owes him no favors and less respect. It will be in their institutional interest to leak damaging material on Trump. The same applies to other bureaucracies. Will a life-long EPA employ take retirement knowing he won’t be replaced, or if he is, by somebody who will take policy in a direction he deplores? Such an employee could be a fine source. Trump, remember, will only be president, not emperor, and as such subject to all the passive-aggressive magic a bureaucracy can produce. Ditto the Pentagon, the State Department, the FBI, and even conventionally newsless outposts like Transportation and Labor.

A probe in Monday’s Post reveals a tangle of potential regulatory conflicts for Trump at HUD, the FAA, Labor, the Trademark Office and the EPA more twisting and knotted than 10 pounds of thin spaghetti cooling in a colander. Trump’s decision to transfer control of his business to his sons has created, in the words of Axios reporter Mike Allen, “a story that will never go away.” Giant servings will be available to every reporter who lines up to place an order.

Trump has traveled the world for 40 years, leaving a trail—sometimes just a faint one—of his deal-making. BuzzFeed just visualized “Trumpworld,” their word for his “giant network of businesses, investments, and corporate connections” as a computer diagram drawing the connections among his family, Cabinet picks, and advisers. Now containing 1,500 people and organizations, the BuzzFeed diagram will grow as readers and others add to the data set. Future stories abound in the grid BuzzFeed has laid down. The Post deserves commendation for its Sunday package about Trump’s entangling foreign alliances.

And then there are Trump’s enemies in his own party, people like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who similarly wish him no good. Scratch a dozen Republicans, and you’ll find a few Trump rats. McCain, it’s worth noting, alerted FBI Director James Comey to Trump’s alleged Russian entanglements in early December. Capitol Hill could further assist reporters with leaks that burn Trump. It’s not unthinkable that Senate leaders like McCain will use his awesome subpoena power to investigate the president. Even Trump’s allies can’t be completely trusted. Being a Trump ally is a treacherous business—just ask Chris Christie. And as a spate of stories noted this week, not all of the Trump appointees reside completely on his page. Like predecessors in previous administrations, some of them will leak at crucial times to preserve their interests. They can and will be cultivated by reporters.

Consider the Nixon administration, which presented an anti-press posture akin to Trump’s, sending Vice President Spiro Agnew to give speeches designed to delegitimize journalists. Nixon also fought with the press by seeking to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. This proved a disaster. In his book, Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein quotes Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg on the course-change navigated by the top newspapers in the wake of Nixon’s reaction. “A newspaper industry that for thirty years and more had been living happily ... on government handouts was suddenly in widespread revolt,” Ellsberg commented. “One paper after another was clamoring for its chance, not just to get a piece of a story but to step across the line into radical civil disobedience.”

Like Nixon, Trump may have won a sizeable audience with his anti-press frothings. But he remains unpopular with at least half of the nation, and they constitute an eager audience for critical reporting. Somebody could remind Gingrich that it’s much harder to shut down readers and viewers than it is a segment of the media. The harder Trump rides the press—and he gives no sign of dismounting—the higher he elevates reporters in the estimation of many voters. Witness how many publications are selling subscriptions by promising to “hold Trump accountable.”

In a widely read and insightful year-end piece that I urge you to read, press scholar Jay Rosen surveyed the scene and predicted that “winter is coming” for the American press under Trump. Many of the shots Rosen takes hit the target. But as a forecaster he’s no groundhog.

It’s not winter that’s coming with the inauguration of Trump. It’s journalistic spring.

******

Everything is coming up daisies. Almost everything. Send dead flower arrangements via email to [email protected]. My email alerts love spring showers, my Twitter feed adores Easter candy, and my RSS feed is reborn every time it dies.