I suspect MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is still fed up with the president’s fibfests.
“If Trump is going to keep lying like he has been every day on stuff this important [the coronavirus pandemic], we should, all of us, stop broadcasting it,” she lowered the boom on MaddowBlog in March. “Honestly, it’s going to cost lives.”
Trump stopped his daily coronavirus briefings, mainly because his medical experts were painfully exposing his cluelessness in dealing with the deadliest disease outbreak since the global influenza pandemic of 1918.
But with Trump, every day proves he leads the league in presidential incompetence and truth-torturing.
Anyway, this old reporter understands Maddow’s frustration. Trump’s a serial liar, pathological or otherwise. Through April 3, his 1,170th day as president, the Washington Post had documented 18,000 times Trump “has made false or misleading claims.”
Trump’s averaging more than 15 whoppers a day, according to the Post. The paper said that since its last update — in January — “he’s been averaging just over 23 claims a day. That’s slightly higher than the 22 a day he recorded in 2019.”
Kentucky Journalism Hall-of-Famer Bill Straub gets Maddow’s exasperation, too. But he cautions that boycotting presidential pressers, no matter how self-serving and prevaricating, would likely boomerang on reporters.
Fox News and right-wing papers like the Washington Times will keep showing up for Trump, warned Straub, who retired as White House and political correspondent for Scripps-Howard News Service. (He headed The Kentucky Post’s Frankfort bureau before becoming Washington correspondent for the Kentucky and Cincinnati Posts.) “Trump’s rhetoric and lies will be getting out there, regardless of whether ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN is broadcasting it,” he said.
Though Fox News is, in effect, the Trump-GOP propaganda ministry, Straub said it “is the most watched news network in the country.”
He cautioned that media outlets that don’t cover Trump, even when he blatantly boosts his reelection in the guise of legit news conferences, “run the risk of it becoming something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.” The pro-Trump media will say, “‘See, we told you they were the liberal media, and now they’re not even covering the president of the United States and what he has to say.’ They’ll just play it as being just another example of the ‘biased media.’”
Straub’s Washington tenure encompassed the Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. “I’ve never seen a politician who lied as much as Trump,” Straub said. “I can’t even think of anybody to compare him to.” (He meant politicians in Frankfort and Washington.)
The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty is an ex-White House scribe, too. She also wasn’t for ditching Trump’s coronavirus briefings. “The real question is how to report what a president says when it is disconnected from reality,” she wrote shortly after Maddow proposed pulling the plug on Trump.
Tumulty was glad Team Trump reprised daily White House briefings, which ended in about mid-2018. She hoped they might “continue once the coronavirus crisis has passed,” though “not the way they are being conducted now, which is as a substitute for the rallies Trump can no longer hold.”
Tumulty conceded that during his daily pressers, the president “lied that the virus is ‘something that we have tremendous control over.’ He has promoted an unproven drug treatment for combating the infection. He rewrites the history of the epidemic to make his own performance look better (‘I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic’). He erupts at individual journalists (‘You’re a terrible reporter’). He plays the victim (‘It costs me billions and billions of dollars to be president’).”
Trump still spouts lies and half-truths on every issue that affects him and his administration. So Straub wishes White House correspondents would agree on a plan for dealing with the Great Prevaricator. But he concedes that a unified Fourth Estate approach won’t be easy.
“News outlets take great pride in being independent and pursuing their own stories and breaking stories, which is very important. They need a strategy – all of them working together. I understand that pretty much goes against the grain of most newspeople. But it’s the only way.”
The gist of Tumulty’s musing is still timely. She suggested that “reporters in the room should coordinate on their own to control the flow of questions.”
Trump remains the controller of question flow.
The president loves to call on hired guns from the Trump-friendly media. When he has to recognize real reporters, he usually answers evasively, makes things up, and often insults the reporters and the network or newspaper they represent.
Reporters still aren’t coordinating questions or regularly backing each other up. For example, Paula Reid’s brothers and sisters of the Fourth Estate left her twisting in the wind the other day.
The CBS White House correspondent asked Trump why he hadn’t “announced a plan to get 36 million unemployed Americans back to work,” adding, “You’re overseeing historic economic despair.”
He claimed his plan was “each state…opening and opening up very effectively” and slammed Reed as “a rude person.” She stood her ground. “But a lot of these jobs are not coming back,” she tried to continue.
“That’s enough of you,” Trump harrumphed, cutting her off and pointing to another reporter who asked him how much longer the Canadian border would be closed.
Trump, according to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, verbally fled “from Paula Reid, in fear, as he does whenever a reporter, and for some reason especially women reporters, press him on an important question. … He turned to a man whom he correctly bet was not going to back up Paula Reid.”
Even so, Straub hopes the White House press corps will huddle “at the Old Ebbitt Grille near the White House or someplace someday day and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.’”
He’s not betting the farm on such a conclave.
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