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As Trump Declares War On The Press, Media Should Prepare For Battle

As Trump Declares War On The Press, Media Should Prepare For Battle

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

“We have a respect for the press when it comes to the government, … that is something that you can’t ban an entity from. Conservative, liberal or otherwise, I think that‘s what makes a democracy a democracy, versus a dictatorship.” Sean Spicer, December 16, 2016

The White House’s petulant decision on Friday to ban several major news outlets from a media gaggle with press secretary Sean Spicer ignited justifiable outrage among journalists. And the outcry was noticeably bipartisan. “This is an attempt to bully the press by using access as a weapon to manipulate coverage,” warned Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page director for TheWall Street Journal.

Now that outrage needs to be institutionalized. It needs to be backed up by the power and prestige of the country’s largest news organizations. In other words, it’s time for institutions to take collective action and fight back.

Here’s what Media Matters stressed three months ago in the wake of Trump’s victory: “Moving forward, news organizations face a stark, and possibly defining choice in terms of how they respond to any radical efforts to curb the media’s White House access.”

Since then, the Trump team has repeatedly pushed the press around. (Banning outlets from the gaggle on Friday was just the latest and most high profile example.) And time and again, the Trump team has gotten away with it.

The kerfuffle wasn’t just a random power play designed to embarrass reporters from TheNew York Times, BuzzFeed, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC, and other outlets that were shut out. It was part of a larger, well-orchestrated, and incremental campaign to cut off journalists from reporting on the government. (Note also that there have been no State Department press briefings since Trump was inaugurated.)

All of this while the president forcefully moves to demonize America’s free and open press. “I called the fake news ‘the enemy of the people’ — and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources, they just make them up when there are none,” Trump announced during his media-bashing address at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name. We’re going to do something about it.”

Yet even in the wake of last week’s stunning Trump attacks and the banning of outlets from a Spicer gaggle, we’re still not seeing the level of forceful group action from news organizations that the situation requires. (They took collective action to register complaints with the Obama White House.)

To their credit, reporters from The Associated Press, Time, and USA Today decided to spontaneously boycott Friday’s briefing. But while several outlets – including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and McClatchy newspapers – announced that they would not attend any future briefings where other outlets are banned, others dropped the ball. On Friday night, ABC‘s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News all covered the White House’s attempt to ban certain news outlets from meeting with Spicer that day, but as Media Matters noted, none of them gave any indication that their networks would refuse to participate in future briefings that are similarly restrictive. (More than 320,000 people have signed Media Matters’ petition urging members of the White House press corps to collectively stand up against Trump’s media blacklisting.)

In addition to refusing to attend restricted briefings, news organizations have several ways to push back as a group. They should:

  • Temporarily disinvite White House surrogates. Just as there is no law that requires the administration to have open briefings, there’s no law that says news outlets have to invite White House surrogates every week to their Sunday political news shows. (The Trump administration purposefully refuses to provide surrogates to certain CNN programs.) So the next time the White House tries to ban news outlets from getting access, all of the television players should temporarily disinvite administration surrogates as a way to register their deep concern.
  • Loudly demand that Spicer be fired. I understand that whoever replaces Spicer might engage in similar behavior. But with his recent attempt to bar major news outlets from a briefing (in addition to his weeks of pushing falsehoods from the podium), Spicer proved himself to be an unethical and untrustworthy spokesperson. To date, however, I haven’t heard loud demands from major news organization or associations that Spicer, the point person for the White House’s war on the press, be fired. (Note: Axios reports today that in a highly unusual move, Spicer “personally picked up the phone and connected outside officials with reporters to try to discredit a New York Times article about Trump campaign aides’ contact with Russia, then remained on the line for the brief conversations.”)
  • Boycott press events hosted by Spicer. That was the suggestion made by veteran journalist Kurt Andersen:

  • Send the interns. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has been advocating this approach for weeks: De-emphasize the significance of White House press productions by sending interns to cover the events while senior reporters are out in the field tracking down better leads. It “means our major news organizations don’t have to cooperate with this,” Rosen advised. “They don’t have to lend talent or prestige to it. They don’t have to be props.”
  • Stop televising so much of the White House press briefings live every day. The press briefings, in particular, provide a forum for administration misinformation. Why reward the White House with free daily airtime while it’s simultaneously waging a war on the press, and specifically while it’s trying to deny access to certain news outlets?

The Trump White House bars CNN from a press “gaggle,” so CNN punishes the White House by airing its press briefings live most days?

With a payoff like that, why would the White House ever stop its dangerous and destructive behavior?

IMAGE: www.whitehouse.gov

Steve Bannon To Journalists: Kneel Before President Trump

Steve Bannon To Journalists: Kneel Before President Trump

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

President Trump’s chief strategist just said flat out what has been clear for weeks: This administration considers journalists the enemy and plans to do everything it can to weaken and delegitimize the free press over the next four years.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Steve Bannon told The New York Timesyesterday. “I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Bannon added. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign. … That’s why you have no power. You were humiliated.”

Bannon has laid bare the Trump administration’s expectations for the press. Trump’s team has no respect for the place of adversarial journalism in the democratic process. The president and his administration’s officials want — and believe they deserve — favorable coverage. And if they don’t get it, they will lash out at reporters, outlets, and the media as a whole.

Sycophants and propagandists — like Breitbart.com, the pro-Trump website Bannon ran until joining the Trump campaign last year — will be favored. Those who dare to publish stories that damage the administration, or point out Trump and his administration’s lies, will be punished.

Throughout his campaign, Trump laced into the press, blacklisted journalists and outlets who provided critical coverage, threatened to use the power of the government against them and open up libel laws, and condemned them to press pens where he could mock them for the surrounding crowd. His former campaign manager physically battered a reporter who got out of line.

Now he’s president, and there is no sign of a pivot. Instead, his performance draws eerie parallels to the actions of authoritarian regimes that have targeted and crushed the independence of the press in their own countries.

Reporters can stand up for the principles they hold dear, or they can be steamrolled and humiliated.

On Friday, Trump will give his first press conference as president. It will be his next opportunity to bend them to his will — and their next chance to do something about it.

IMAGE: Media Matters

Trump Team Blacklists CNN After Inauguration

Trump Team Blacklists CNN After Inauguration

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

President Donald Trump and his team continued their unprecedented attempts to delegitimize and blacklist CNN by refusing to have a representative appear on CNN’s Sunday political talk show, State of the Union, while booking appearances on the other major political talk shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox Broadcasting Co.

At the top of the January 22 edition of CNN’s State of the Union, host Jake Tapper said that his show “asked the Trump White House for a member of the new administration to join us this morning, but they declined.” Members of Trump’s team including White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, however, made appearances on the other major Sunday political talk shows: This Week on ABC, Face The Nation on CBS, Meet the Press on NBC, and Fox News Sunday on Fox Broadcasting Co. Trump and his team have a long history of blacklisting reporters from events, most notably when Trump revokedThe Washington Post’s press credentials during the Republican primaries.

The Trump team’s presumed blackout of CNN comes after escalating attempts to delegitimize the network, brand it as “fake news,” and avoid questions from CNN reporters. During Trump’s first press conference as president-elect on January 11, Trump refused to take a question from CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta, calling his network “fake news” and “terrible.” Following the event, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer admitted to threatening to remove Acosta from the press conference and later demanded an apology. Trump ally and Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich responded to the incident by asserting that Trump should use the altercation to “shrink and isolate” CNN and eventually “close down the elite press.” Acosta and his colleagues from across the media condemned Trump’s treatment of CNN.

On January 12, Trump doubled down on his attacks against the network, claiming on Twitter that CNN “is in a total meltdown with their FAKE NEWS” and that its “credibility will soon be gone.” Trump also pre-emptively attacked a CNN report on his daughter Ivanka, tweeting that CNN “of all places, is doing a Special Report on my daughter, Ivanka. Considering it is CNN, can’t imagine it will be great!”

The Trump team’s refusal to appear on CNN came one day after it declined to air the live feed of Spicer’s first press conference after the inauguration, where Spicer blatantly lied about the size of inauguration crowds. According to Variety’s Brian Steinberg, “CNN’s refusal to take the live feed suggests executives there are reluctant to put false statements on air, and, what’s more, do not think the new White House press representative is entirely credible.” From the January 21 report:

“CNN’s decision to not air the press conference live illustrates a recognition that the role of the press must be different under Trump. When the White House holds press briefings to promote demonstrably false information and refuses to take questions, then press ‘access’ becomes meaningless at best and complicit at worst,” said Danna Young, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who studies politics and the media. “Democracy works best when journalists have access to the executive branch, of course. But that holds true if and only if that access leads to verifiable, accurate information. The decision on behalf of CNN to wait and verify before airing it live suggests that the media are adapting quickly to this new era.”

To be certain, news outlets routinely make decisions about whether to air press events live, usually based on projections about news value. But this press conference, held just a day after the President’s inauguration, would have been a hot prospect for a cable-news outlet, and could have sparked hours of debate and follow-up on CNN’s schedule.  In an unusual and aggressive maneuver, CNN aired its regular weekday lineup this Saturday, underscoring heavy interest in breaking news of a series of massive protests by women across the nation in response to Trump’s presidency as well as the new President’s first few days in office.

For more on Trump’s attacks on the press, check out Media Matters’ First Amendment Watch.

Trump’s War With the Media Has Begun And We’ve Seen Nothing Yet

Trump’s War With the Media Has Begun And We’ve Seen Nothing Yet

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Less than 24 hours after being sworn in, Donald Trump declared the first war of his presidency—on the media.

At CIA headquarters Saturday morning, Trump immediately brought up the “dishonest media,” then transitioned into praise for the agency he said was going to destroy ISIS, then resumed trashing the press, first for saying he didn’t get along with America’s spies (he called them “Nazis” last week), and then for the inaugural coverage.

“And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media,” Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth… We had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field.”

Trump didn’t stop there—even though his inaugural attendance was lower than President Obama’s, according to numerous overhead photo comparisons. He lambasted Time magazine for saying his staff had removed a bust of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, saying it was hidden behind a cameraman.

“Now, the big story—the retraction was, like, where?” Trump said. “Was it a line? Or do they even bother putting it in? So I only like to say that because I love honesty. I like honest reporting.”

Trump’s tirade didn’t stop there. Hours later, Sean Spicer, his press secretary, called the White House press corps into the James S. Brady briefing room in the White House (which last weekend they threatened to close) and lectured them for “deliberately false reporting” on the crowd size and the MLK bust.

“There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable,” Spicer said. “And I’m here to tell you that it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable, as well.”

The first war under Trump’s presidency is with the press and it’s escalating. It’s not just floating the idea that the White House pressroom may move. It’s not just last week’s pre-inaugural press conference where Trump labeled Buzzfeed and CNN “fake media.” It’s not just his latest tweets criticizing celebrities who don’t like him, or dismissing the millions of women (and men) who marched to protest his presidency on Saturday.

These incidents all raise a serious question: what’s going to happen to the First Amendment with a bully in the pulpit?

The answer, according to a handful of lawyers specializing in First Amendment and press issues, is that Trump is primed to use his office’s great power to intimidate, obstruct, censor, spy on and silence the media. In the most visible instances, bullying, the president faces no restrictions on his speech, regardless of its truth or who he victimizes.

“He can say whatever he wants using whatever means he chooses,” said James Goodale, chief counsel for the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers case and a leading legal expert on the First Amendment, when asked if Trump faces any restrictions on presidential speech and adding that he cannot be sued for his outbursts.

The Bully

But the damage is likely to go deeper and escalate in far more serious ways than a mere war on words.

“Our soon-to-be president could weaken the American system of free expression… [with] techniques that involve weakening and undermining the institutions and practices that enable public opinion to check state power and legitimate our system of democracy,” wrote Jack Balkin, the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, in a prescient article late last year.

Baklin listed five likely abuses of the presidential podium, most of which we’ve already seen from Trump and his aides. They start with the fact that Trump is a habitual liar. Trump “has found a way to lie so boldly and so frequently that it’s virtually impossible to hold him to account,” he said. “If politicians lie all the time, and never pay a price for it, there’s no reason to believe any promises they make.”

Next was the related propaganda technique called “gaslighting,” Balkin said, or “creating a false reality and causing the public to doubt what is actually true or false. By making everything uncertain and a matter of ideological perspective, government officials stoke anger and distrust in elite institutions on the one hand, and produce cynicism, resignation and despair on the other.”

That’s what spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway did this earlier month when she told CNN to stop listening to Trump’s literal words and trust what was in his heart—as if a president-elect’s words have no literal meaning.

As Melik Kaylan, a longtime reporter who has covered authoritarian regimes noted in Forbes, such intentional chaos is a reality TV ploy that also serves political strongmen. He drew on comments to MSNBC by Michael Hirschhorn, a top reality TV producer, that such gaslighting helps authoritarian regimes, because, like a TV series that never ends, “you don’t resolve disputes; you foster them endlessly to retain public attention… You stay entertained but confused, paranoid even. That’s why you need [leaders like] me.”

While that fact-blurring dynamic is becoming the ‘new normal’ under Trump, there are other ways he can go after the media, Balkin wrote, anticipating what we keep seeing. Trump and his team can deny access, or threaten it by closing a West Wing briefing room, and require journalists to take drug tests, as Esquire reported. He can stonewall or not release information, as voters saw with his income tax returns during the campaign, or by not giving media access to administration paper and electronic records.

Most disturbing, Balkin said, was that Trump can use federal surveillance tools against journalists.

“These institutions constructed formal and informal rules and norms designed to prevent abuse by the White House,” he said, referring to the FBI, CIA and NSA. “But as Richard Nixon’s presidency demonstrated, these rules and norms don’t always work, and given enough time, a determined president can chip away at or circumvent many of them.”

This is not a hypothetical threat, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Raymond Pryke, professor of First Amendment Law at the University of California Irvine School of Law, in a paper sent to AlterNet. Trump’s hostility to the press is well established, he wrote, giving the best-known examples of going after a disabled New York Times reporter, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly and Kelly Tur of NBC. “The Trump campaign denied press credentials to media that criticized him, including the Washington Post and Politico. His statements about [weakening] libel law also reflect his lack of understanding of the law and the First Amendment.”

On the libel front—where the press can be dragged into court to face accusations of intentionally publishing incorrect and damaging information—the press has less to worry about, the First Amendment lawyers said. On the other hand, they face very real worries about executive branch surveillance and spying.

“Trump can’t change the libel laws. The libel laws are created by state legislatures and are subject to constitutional limitation,” said Goodale. But Goodale said Trump could go after journalists to force them to reveal their sources.

Indeed, Trump has already tried to do this, pressuring NBC to reveal who inside the intelligence community leaked critical documents about him. “If the federal government subpoenas reporters who do not wish to testify about their sources they can go into contempt and defy Trump,” Goodale wrote, adding that was not always successful. “[The New York Times’] Judith Miller tried this and lost. [The Times’] James Risen defied the government and won (they decided not to hold him in contempt).”

Shockingly, it is President Obama who has given Trump a blueprint for going after leakers to the media and sources, Chemerinsky said, by using the Espionage Act of 1917, a broad law allowing prosecution for disclosing national security information. “Since its enactment, 12 prosecutions have been brought for disclosure of information, and nine in those were during the Obama administration.”

“There is no First Amendment right for a reporter to keep a source confidential,” he said. “Many states, like California, have shield laws that allow for this, but there is no such law at the federal level. This gives the president a powerful tool to harass and intimidate the press.”

The First Amendment lawyers agreed that the stakes are enormous, because the media—whether mainstream reporters, alternative press, blogs or social media—function as the Constitution’s check and balance against political tyranny.

On a more day-to-day level, Trump’s deepening war with the media means the public is going to have to get used to a president who lies, distorts, bullies, and evades. Meanwhile, the media is going to have to get used to being threatened, hounded and likely spied on—and possibly prosecuted—when they dare speak truth to power in Trump’s America.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights.

IMAGE: Press Secretary Sean Spicer deliver an statement at the press briefing room at the White House in Washington U.S., January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria