As I sat this past weekend and watched the train-wreck that was
the rollout of the Mueller Report, I was astounded at its findings. I was
saddened by the Attorney General’s response, and disappointed that the American
people had been ill-served by a media that was eager to get the scoop, and that
missed the opportunity to live up to the expectations of the Founders. The
Founders rightfully posited that it was the news media; the “Fourth Estate”,
that would truly keep us free.
Unfortunately, the American media was duped by the “evil
genius.”
It is and has been Donald Trump’s mantra that leading
journalists across our nation represent “fake news,” as they fought to be the
first to announce his every utterance. The media clamored to beat competitors
to report on his every malevolent act. And they reported them over and over
again. Trump’s purported misdeeds piled upon one another until it seemed
irrefutable that the Mueller report would expose his corruption. While those on
the left listened to pundits predicting his downfall, and those on the right
chanted “no collusion”, American citizens had become numb to the conversation.
The wall-to-wall coverage he was afforded during the
presidential campaign made him ubiquitous in households across America. Whether
you hated him or adored him, you sure knew what he was saying or doing almost
every moment of the day. The media fed us a constant stream of small and large
infractions that at first assaulted our sensibilities. But as the media
continued to chip away at the Trump presidency and his organization, each
infraction became less scandalous, less unnerving, and less outrageous than the
last. Trump coverage began to affect us much as the rowdy relative at the family
reunion. Misbehavior was to be expected. It became common place.
The major news networks were not reporting things that were
fake. They were just reporting things that were not news. You see, if you told
me yesterday that there was a dossier that alleged that Trump had been
compromised by the Soviets, unless you have additional facts to support that
statement today, it is not news. If you’ve informed me already that Trump is a
womanizer who would take illegal steps to hide it, and you cannot add factual
data to that story today, then it is not news. But the American public was fed
a steady diet of Trump trivia all day, every day.
He determined the news cycle. If it wasn’t going his way, he
would do or say something outrageous. And the media fell for it. The most
minute fact would send the media into a tail spin of competing news casts
outlining every tiny detail of every tiny infraction. They came to call it,
“going down the rabbit hole.” And Trump had lots of rabbits that he dispatched
at will.
I contrast this mode of journalism to that which shaped our
nation in the 1960’s. It was the media that turned the Civil Rights movement
from a spark to a flame. They did not pontificate. They simply showed us the
facts; facts made more impactful by the advent of broadcast television news.
When they held up the mirror before our faces, America could not tolerate the
image and demanded change.
But coverage of the Trump presidency has showered us with
trivia, leaving the American public to dig through the minutia to find truth.
We need more reporting and less punditry. We need more journalism and less
entertainment.
We don’t know what is in the Mueller report. But because of
the way this conversation has been shaped, the fact that Mueller did not indict
Trump is being viewed as a failure. However, the failure is not in the Mueller
report; it is in the media reporting.
