Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and Columbia Journalism Review publisher Kyle Pope agree: The press is spending too much time talking about itself.
“The media have now moved on from Russia to cover themselves,” Conway said Monday on Fox News.
Her boss has had something to do with this, of course. One day earlier, President Trump tweeted an edited video clip that depicted him beating up a CNN logo. Three days before that, he tweeted a sexist attack on MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski.
Conway conveniently focused on the effect (media coverage that centers on the media) while ignoring the cause (Trump).
That’s not really fair, but it likely reflects how many people view the situation. Pope argued on Wednesday that the way to prove the media’s value is to “get the hell out of the picture.”
“The media’s impulse, which is understandable, is to keep the focus on his threats to the press, and not to let them become normalized,” Pope wrote. “But we have reached the point at which the media response has become counterproductive and even beneficial to the president and his lackeys in the White House, who have turned the West Wing into a megaphone for Trump’s faux media war and reporters in the White House briefing room into photo-op foils.”
On Sunday, I offered a similar observation of the briefing-room dynamic. A White House that has made off-camera press briefings the norm decided to stage an on-camera session on the day that Trump went after Brzezinski.
Why? Probably because Trump’s communications team knew that questions about the president’s tweets would dominate the Q&A.
Voters don’t get to see a lot of footage from the briefing room these days. What little exists shows the White House press corps asking question after question about the press.
That’s exactly what Trump wants.
“The president is fully aware that his war against the press is one of the few things that is working for him,” Pope wrote. “His campaign promise to replace Obamacare is in tatters, his immigration ban has been watered down by the courts, the wall is still only (and thankfully) an architect’s rendering. There’s very little of substance left to bind Trump to his base or to the right-wing mediasphere that has been his cheerleader. Take away the war on the media and the bond between Trump and his supporters thins out fast.”
To be clear, Pope did not advocate a total blackout of Trump’s media tweets; he contended that journalists need to “stop treating Trump’s war with the press as if it’s the most important thing happening in this country. It’s not.”
Evaluating coverage priorities is never a bad idea, but to the extent that news outlets divert their attention from Trump’s media-bashing tweets because they think such a move will weaken his support, they will perpetuate the notion that the press is an oppositional force working strategically to undermine the president.
That’s the media’s predicament. Almost any decision can look like an effort to bring down Trump.