No one wants to bear any responsibility for the rise of Donald Trump. That’s understandable. The truth is that virtually every institution in America – from reality-distorting conservative political organizations, to revenue-starved mainstream media outlets, to the feckless and divisive leadership of the president – deserves some reproach. In the effort to avoid introspection, these institutions are directing their criticisms toward one another. Barack Obama is just the latest to join in the act. In an appearance before reporters at one of their regular self-reverential affairs, the president took the opportunity to scold the Fourth Estate for their handling of the celebrity GOP presidential frontrunner. While the president made some objectively valuable critiques of the journalistic establishment, he is perhaps the worst person in the country to issue those criticisms.
The venue Obama chose to scold the nation’s news outlets on Monday night was the awarding of Syracuse University’s Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. There, during his keynote address, Obama confessed that the world is increasingly apprehensive about the state of political discourse in the indispensable nation. “When our elected officials and our political campaigns become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn’t matter what’s true and what’s not, that makes it all but impossible for us to make good decisions on behalf of future generations,” Obama said. He’s right.
Donald Trump’s ability to “untether” our political discourse from rationality or reason is remarkable. This phenomenon was cleverly illustrated in a piece by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, who observed that the “2016 campaign has moved from post-fact to pro-nonsense.” To prove his thesis, he cited just one sprawling example: the Trump campaign’s repeated assertion that Ted Cruz licensed an artistic nude photograph of his model wife and illegally coordinated with a non-aligned super PAC to use that photo in a narrowly-targeted Facebook post directed at Mormon women in Utah. Trump makes this contention to justify his attacks on the physical appearance of Ted Cruz’s wife and his refusal to repudiate an utterly unsupported tale of lurid exploits between Cruz and five other women that appeared in a fabulist gossip rag.
The mere fact that this is the state of politics is a sad story of cultural devolution. More disturbingly, the facts Trump claims justify his objectionable behavior don’t exist. There is no evidence Cruz “bought the rights” to any G.Q. photographs, that he coordinated with an independent PAC, or that (as has been alleged) Facebook is trying to hide the truth of this whole sordid affair. In fact, most of these dubious assertions come from unhinged and virtually anonymous Twitter users. The fact that the world is full of unhinged people with a tenuous grasp on reality isn’t new. In a nobler past, however, responsible presidential candidates declined to indulge their delusions. Donald Trump is the more reckless sort.
While a corrosive occurrence like the Trump campaign exposes a societal sickness, most of the blame for Donald Trump lies primarily with Donald Trump – not to mention his now millions of morally compromised voters. Surely, those individuals and institution that know better and yet still enabled this thoughtless candidate’s rise are also due some opprobrium. Political media, which provided the candidate with nearly $2 billion in earned media coverage over the course of his campaign, is owed quite a bit of it.
Voters in the “smartphone” age, the president said, “would be better served if billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability, especially when politicians issue unworkable plans or make promises they can’t keep.” “A job well done is about more than just handing someone a microphone,” the president added.
“For all the sideshows in a political season, Americans are still hungry for the truth,” Obama concluded while beseeching his audience of media professionals to avoid coverage of the “sensational story” merely for its revenue-generating potential. Don’t “dumb down the news,” the president said.
These are smart criticisms, but the president will be dismissed by precisely those he is trying to reach. He perfected Trump’s game of providing the press with a storyline, feeding media new episodes in the series to advance the plot, and punishing those outlets that failed to play along. Barack Obama is just as responsible for dumbing down the news as anyone else.
“President Barack Obama has never been shy in expressing his distaste for some of traditional media’s bad habits,” wrote CNN’s Kevin Liptak nearly one year ago. The report noted that Obama has long criticized cable news for pandering to a shrinking, self-selected audience. Print reporters, too, have been admonished by the president for failing to focus on his achievements as much as the nation’s challenges. That why Obama appealed to the internet: Re/code, BuzzFeed, Vox.com, the YouTube-based “Between Two Ferns” with comedian Zach Galifianakis, and perhaps most notoriously, GloZell Green – a web-series host who made a name for herself by bathing in a bathtub full of milk and children’s cereal.
Some of these outlets enjoy more journalistic credibility than the others, but all were utilized by the White House to disseminate Obama’s preferred narratives. Barack Obama used these outlets for his political purposes, and they, in turn, used him to generate viewership and pad their advertising-supported bottom lines. How is that so distinct from the symbiosis between Donald Trump and the political press?
And while Donald Trump has made a sport of antagonizing the press and individual reporters to the point at which it has become dangerous, Barack Obama’s administration has by no means a sterling record on media freedom.
For reporters, Obama’s promised transparency is today regarded as an Orwellian joke. “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said two-decade veteran of the New York Times David Sanger. “[T]his is the most hostile to the media that has been in United States history,” MSNBC’s Bob Franken agreed. “I’ve never dealt with an administration where more officials — some of whom are actually paid to be the spokesmen for various federal agencies — demand everything be off the record,” said former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. “This administration is as un-transparent as the Bush administration — if not more,” asserted Post investigative reporter Dana Priest in the documentary “War on Whistleblowers,” which focused on the White House’s efforts to silence and intimidate conscience-addled administration officials and the reporters who would cover them honestly.
When it comes to media malpractice, Donald Trump is the natural evolution of the phenomenon Barack Obama helped midwife into existence. The adulatory and uncritical coverage the president enjoyed in 2008 and, to a lesser extent, 2012 is not so different from that which Trump enjoys. Media-generated Democratic campaign themes like the non-existent “war on women” and “dog whistle racism” was as much nonsense then as that which Trump peddles to his audience of addlepated devotees today, aided by unprecedented cable and network camera time. The business of politics as entertainment and news media as soap opera predates both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, but they are both creations of its celebrity manufacturing process.
The president surely made some salient points about the unnerving Trump phenomenon, but who is listening anymore? After years of administration-directed antagonism toward them, it might be fitting that Obama has himself turned into a whistleblower. While his message is important, the messenger is deeply flawed.
