David A. Graham, July 3, 2017<\/p>\n
The press may never succeed in eliciting popular sympathy\u2014instead, it needs to convince members of the public that the president\u2019s rhetoric will hurt them, too.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump has a knack for choosing weak adversaries. He recognized the potential in taking advantage of undocumented workers<\/a>. He used the element of surprise to take out Vince McMahon<\/a>. Then he cut through a field of supposedly formidable Republicans as though they were Lilliputians, setting himself up for a general-election match-up against Hillary Clinton\u2014who, it turned out, was a notably weak Democratic nominee.<\/p>\n Now it\u2019s the press\u2019s turn. While he\u2019s bashed the news media since early in his campaign, the president has recently elevated his feud, with attacks on Mika Brzezinski and CNN that shocked even benumbed observers. Reporters are, understandably, horrified, but the general reaction from the press seems likely to encourage Trump while failing to rally the public against his behavior.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s attack on Brzezinski, including bizarre (and seemingly invented) claims about a botched facelift, is fully in keeping with the behavior of a man who boasted about committing sexual assault. His decision to post a video in which he attacks a man with the CNN logo superimposed over his face<\/a>\u2014an alteration of an old appearance with McMahon at a WWE event\u2014can only be read as encouraging violence against the media; the best that can be said for it is that it might be, like professional wrestling, insincere, though what it would mean for someone to commit insincere physical violence against the press is anybody\u2019s guess.<\/p>\n For reporters, it feels demoralizing to be attacked repeatedly by the president of the United States; some feel physically threatened. But the best way to respond to this is to make a stronger case to the American people as to why <\/em>Trump\u2019s attacks are unacceptable, rather than expecting it to be self-evident, or hoping that pity and sympathy will elicit public support. Rather than explaining why the president attacking the media is bad for the media, the media need to appeal to the public\u2019s self-interest and explain why it\u2019s bad for them.<\/p>\n Most Americans disapprove of the president\u2014but most of them disapprove of the press as well. Just a third of Americans trust the media<\/a>. Two-thirds believe the media are politically biased<\/a>. Forty-five percent say the media \u201cabuse<\/a>\u201d their First Amendment rights, versus just 35 who say they use those rights responsibly. Other presidents have faced implacably hostile press corps, but none of them have had the benefit of so unpopular a press. Trump is trying to press that advantage, and simply appealing to the public to take the side of the press on grounds of reasonability is unlikely to find much traction.<\/p>\n Besides, Trump has been assailing reporters for months: There were his repeated attempts at bullying NBC\u2019s Katy Tur; his attack on Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, for having \u201cblood coming out of her wherever\u201d; and more general bashing that was a staple of campaign rallies. This had little impact on his ability to win almost half of the votes in the November election. Even when Republican candidate for Congress Greg Gianforte physically assaulted Guardian <\/em>reporter Ben Jacobs in May (don\u2019t take my word for it: Gianforte pleaded guilty), he was easily elected. And reactions to Gianforte\u2019s assault, instead of reflecting moral principles, quickly split along partisan lines, with Democrats outraged and many Republicans rationalizing the assault.<\/p>\n The press, and the nation, can ill-afford for condemning physical attacks on reporters to become a partisan issue, and yet so many responses to Trump have fallen into the trap of encouraging precisely such partisan reactions. Take the statement that CNN\u2019s public-relations team put out over the weekend<\/a>. \u201cIt is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters,\u201d it began. Fair enough. Next: \u201cClearly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied when she said the President had never done so.\u201d This is a little dodgier. Some precincts of the press are more nervous about calling White House officials liars than others<\/a>, but it\u2019s hard to see what purpose dragging in a silly claim by a deputy spokeswoman serves here. And then the coup de grace:<\/p>\n Instead of preparing for his overseas trip, his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, \u200edealing with North Korea and working on his health care bill, he is involved in juvenile behavior far below the dignity of his office. We will keep doing our jobs. He should start doing his.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course the video is juvenile; of course the president should be spending more time staffing his administration, learning what\u2019s in the Senate health-care bill, and boning up on policy. But what purpose does this snark serve? It only encourages the view of Trump\u2014and many of his supporters\u2014that the media are out to get him and view him as the enemy.<\/p>\n The press tends to fare best when it doesn\u2019t make itself the story, but that\u2019s particularly imperative here. As Ishaan Tharoor writes<\/a>, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan offers a cautionary tale of what happens when a free press fails to defend itself effectively against an authoritarian leader. But it isn\u2019t sufficient just to declare that the press is under attack. It\u2019s not even enough to declare that the First Amendment is under attack, since even that has lost public support. In a Newseum poll, 74 percent of respondents did not think that \u201cfake news\u201d should be protected<\/a> by freedom of the press\u2014a grave misunderstanding of how a free press operates. Four in 10 Millennials support censorship of offensive speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n