In courtroom dramas, when a witness is testifying and starts to lie or refuses to answer, the lawyer asking the questions will often ask the judge for “permission to treat the witness as hostile.” At that point, the gloves come off, and the attorney starts to ask pointed questions, and then usually gets the witness to confess to the murder.
That’s the way things work in the movies. It’s not always so simple in the real world, with all of its shades of grey. But there’s an argument to be made that the media in general needs to treat president-elect Donald Trump as a hostile witness. He and the press are not on the same page — they’re not even reading the same book. And that isn’t likely to change. If anything, it’s probably going to get worse.
If you want a picture of what the next four years might look like, take a look at what happened during Trump’s first press conference in six months, held at Trump Tower in New York. According to several of those who were in attendance, the number of Trump loyalists and staffers — who clapped after almost every statement — outnumbered members of the actual press.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Before the conference, CNN reported on the existence of a document that was included in a high-level intelligence briefing given to Trump and President Obama, a document that contained allegations about back-room deals between Russia and the president-elect, and reports of deviant sexual behavior. After the CNN report, which didn’t go into the details, BuzzFeed published the entire document.
Trump’s anger at the CNN and BuzzFeed reports was obvious on Twitter — where all of the president-elect’s emotions are on full display — and that carried over to the press conference. When Jim Acosta of CNN repeatedly tried to ask a question, Trump shouted him down and said: “Your network is terrible. You are fake news.” BuzzFeed was described as a “failing pile of garbage.”
After the news conference, Trump’s spokesman and soon-to-be press secretary Sean Spicer went up to Acosta and accused him of being rude, and said that if he tried the same approach again, he would be removed and would not be allowed to ask questions.
This isn’t the first time Trump has taken this approach to the media. During the election campaign, he shouted down Univision anchor and veteran reporter Jorge Ramos when he tried to ask a question, and then had his security staff physically remove Ramos from the room (the Univision journalist was later allowed back in, but never got a response to his question).
There are a number of ways that you could respond to this kind of behavior as a media organization. One is to apologize and try to curry favor with Trump and his staff, to try and get called on during press briefings, to get off-the-record meetings and invitations to parties at Mar-a-Lago, etc.
CNN, for its part, went to a considerable amount of effort to distinguish itself from BuzzFeed — in the same way a child facing punishment will try to shift blame to his or her siblings. And a number of other media outlets continued to ask questions in the press conference, rather than showing any kind of support or solidarity for either CNN or BuzzFeed (although Fox News stood up for CNN after the fact).
The media game being what it is — a hotly competitive business that is under increasing financial pressure — it’s natural for reporters in such an environment to look out for number one, and throw whoever they need to throw under a bus, if that’s what it takes.
That kind of strategy, however, only plays into the hands of someone like Donald Trump, a man who has talked publicly about loosening libel laws so he could more easily sue news outlets like the New York Times, and who repeatedly banned news organizations from his campaign if he didn’t like the stories they wrote. He will almost certainly play favorites with certain outlets when it suits him, and cut them off at the knees when it doesn’t.
A Russian journalist wrote recently about how Trump’s press briefing reminded him of the annual press conferences that President Vladimir Putin holds, which have a kind of circus-like atmosphere and contain virtually no useful information. As Alexey Kovalev put it in his post, “It’s in this man’s best interests to pit you against each other, fighting over artificial scarcities like room space, mic time or, of course, his attention.”
A policy of accommodation or detente might be tempting for media outlets who feel that they have already lost the trust of a large proportion of the people who voted for Donald Trump. They might feel as though being actively hostile — or referring to his false statements as lies — isn’t the best approach, because it will only increase the hatred that Trump supporters feel for the media.
But that battle is all but lost. And normalizing Trump’s behavior or treating him with kid gloves isn’t going to make all of those Trump voters sign up for New York Times or CNN subscriptions all of a sudden. It will only give him even more license to continue to treat the media as a punching bag and then go about his business doing whatever he feels like doing. If the president wants a fight, then he should get one.