Eric Boehlert, Press Run,
August 10, 2020:
When assembled country club golfers started booing reporters and cheering references to "fake news" at Trump's Friday "press conference" held in Bedminster, N.J., that was the moment the media event crossed over into the realm of farce. It was just the latest in a presidency that has been marked by so many moments of shame.
Highlighting the unseriousness of the event, which was carried live on national television and where Trump lied without pause about a raging pandemic, Trump used assembled reporters as his foil. "You'll get to meet the fake news tonight. You'll get to see what I have to go through," he told supporters beforehand. "Who's there? Oh all my killers are there, wow. So you'll get to see some of the people that we deal with every day."
As America catapults towards a certain pandemic death toll of at least 250,000, Trump shows no signs of concern about the national health crisis. ... Trump's dangerous and irrational behavior continues to escalate. And the press is aiding him by eagerly participating in what are clearly re-election events dressed up as "press conferences." Last month, at a supposed press event held in the Rose Garden where no questions were taken, Trump used the event to air endless, bogus attacks against Democratic nominee Joe Biden. ...
"He's finally found a way to hold his precious rallies," tweeted blogger Heather Parton. "Just hold them at his resort properties and call them "news conferences.""
Serious journalists should walk away and refuse to be extras in the Trump charades — refuse to legitimize his scheduled rants. Instead of walking away, reporters seem eager to cooperate. ...
After each of these staged Trump "press conference," there's often lots of media hand wringing about what just happened, and how it wasn't an actual media Q&A. "Presidents do not use the Rose Garden in that kind of naked political fashion," tweeted CNN's Jim Acosta recently. "That was not a press conference, as the WH described it. It was a campaign rally disguised as a press conference. It was a bait and switch." And then the next day the same indignant reporters show up to help stage the same Trump-sponsored kabuki dance all over again.
Less than 24 hours after Friday's farce, where fantasy predictions were made about the coronavirus "disappearing," Trump scheduled another "press conference," and the same journalists showed up for the pseudo-rally event. ...
Some commentators applauded CBS News' Paula Read who effectively ended the Saturday news conference when Trump retreated after she asked why he kept lying about signing the Veterans Choice legislation, which President Barack Obama made law. ... But Trump has told that lie 150 times in public (!) ... Given the stunning rate at which Trump lies, his media sessions with reporters these days should be nonstop encounters where reporters aggressively press him on obvious lies ...
Major news organizations have shown themselves to be unwilling and incapable of saying no to staged Trump events, even though journalists have conceded they aren't newsworthy.
"Over time, the news conferences have become increasingly devoid of actual news," ABC News conceded ... [T]he Times admitted the Bedminster session, featuring polo shirt-wearing Trump loyalists, contained "almost no news." ...
[Trump] needs media attention to stroke his narcissistic needs, and the press has opted to enable the egomaniac. ... [R]eporters are serving as GOP props.
Amanda Marcotte, Salon,
August 10, 2020:
Donald Trump has a dilemma. Along with the rest of the Republican Party, he abhors the idea of enacting the kind of federal relief program that would actually help people and keep the nation's economy from collapsing completely in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. But that kind of substantive relief means giving ordinary working people money, which goes against the core organizing principle of the GOP, which is that government exists to line the pockets of the rich at the expense of everyone else.
However, Republicans and Trump realize that their economic attitudes are wildly unpopular with most Americans, who do not see the pandemic as an exciting opportunity to experiment with how many millions of people can be evicted or foreclosed out of their homes without the stock market taking a hit. ...
So Trump and his Republican allies appear to have settled on a scheme: Try to trick the public into thinking they're taking bold action, while effectively doing nothing at all.
Unfortunately, this a strategy that all too often gets an assist from the mainstream media, which, despite recent improvements in coverage, still keeps getting caught in deeply ingrained bad habits, such as an insistence on false equivalence and a tendency to parrot false White House talking points in headlines. The result is a sea of misleading stories or news segments that portray Republicans as well-meaning, when the real story is about a degree of malice toward the public that's so breathtaking it beggars belief.
Over the weekend ... Trump announced on Saturday that he was signing "executive orders" that would allegedly get aid flowing to stricken Americans despite Congress' failure to pass another coronavirus relief package, a failure Trump blamed on Democrats — even though the House passed a bill in May and it's Senate Republicans who have stalled the talks and refused to negotiate further. ...
But his fake-out worked pretty much as intended, and media sources dutifully ran headlines making it sound like Trump was pushing aid out to people, which he was not doing and never likely intended to do.
The Associated Press and Reuters — whose reporting is syndicated in local newspapers throughout the country — both went with headlines saying things like, "Trump signs coronavirus relief orders" and "Trump extends unemployment benefits, defers payroll tax," without noting that three out of the four so-called orders are merely "memorandums" that will likely end up being toothless because of Trump's legal overreach.
"Trump announces executive actions to provide economic relief after stimulus talks broke down," read a Politico headline.
"Sidestepping Congress, Trump Signs Executive Measures for Pandemic Relief," claimed the New York Times.
"Trump signs 4 executive actions on coronavirus relief," ABC News announced.
These kinds of headlines are misleading in two ways. First, they make the executive actions sound far more substantive than they actually are, making readers believe that help is coming when it's either not coming at all or will be too insubstantial to make a real difference. ...
Even more important, is these headlines serve to obscure the most basic takeaway, which is that Trump's actions are about denying people help, not extending it. Trump's dog-and-pony show is an effort to distract attention from the fact that House Democrats have already passed a bill and Republicans are blocking it from becoming law. If the president seriously wanted to get relief to people, he could pressure the Republican-controlled Senate into voting on the bill Democrats have already passed, with a promise to sign it. ...
Trump's little circus trick only worked over the weekend because it built on another massive and widespread media failure, which is to falsely frame this impasse as a "both sides" story, instead of accurately reporting on the Republican responsibility for the failure to pass a coronavirus relief bill.
As Cydney Hargas at Media Matters reported on Sunday afternoon, the Sunday morning news shows were a minefield of false equivalence, with reporters haranguing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi for not wanting to "compromise" with Republicans and blaming "both sides" for failure to pass a bill. ...
In reality, this is a one-sided problem. The issue isn't "both sides" or "Congress." It's the Republicans. Democrats passed a relief bill in May ... The issue isn't that Democrats won't compromise. It's that Republicans don't want to pass another relief bill.
But the mainstream media continues to live in terror of being accused of "liberal bias," and so resorts to this passive-voice, both-sides-to-blame coverage that only serves to confuse the audience. ...
[B]y falling for Republican tricks and running misleading headlines, the mainstream media is muddying the waters and sowing even more distrust and confusion. ... Now more than ever, it's important for the media to let go of the fetish for "balance" and focus on reporting the truth.
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