A key plank in Donald Trump’s election campaign was his contempt for what he called the “dishonest media,” and that position has not softened with his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States. If anything, he and the rest of his White House team have doubled down on this approach, in an attempt to make the media look even less trustworthy.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer started the process with his first press briefing immediately after the inauguration, in which he lambasted the press for getting the numbers wrong. More recently, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway picked up the torch and used it to set fire to the traditional professional relationship between the media and the president.
In an interview this weekend with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, Conway — a former lawyer and political pollster who was named a senior counselor to the president after Trump won the election — asked why more journalists haven’t been fired for their attacks on Trump and his administration.
“Who is cleaning house? Which one is going to be the first network to get rid of these people who said things that were just not true? Talk about fake news, talk about alternative facts. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go.”
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Wallace tried to interrupt Conway at a number of points to ask questions, but the Trump adviser went on to ask “who’s the first editorial writer — where’s the first blogger that will be let go, that embarrassed his or her outlets? We know all their names.”
Conway argued that if the mainstream media was a private-sector business that actually cared about turning a profit, “20 percent of the people would be gone.” The Trump adviser also criticized journalists who post their opinions about Trump and his administration on Twitter and other social networks while also reporting on the White House and political policy.
“Look, not every network and every press outlet is created equally in this. But if you read people’s Twitter feed, that crap would never pass editorial muster in a newspaper or on your TV show and your the network here, nor should it.”
The fact that Wallace’s attempts to interview Conway were derailed by her off-topic responses is not uncommon, according to many of those who have interviewed her or watched her performances on Fox News and other channels during the election and its aftermath.
Slate writer William Saletan has called Conway “the slipperiest political flack in history,” and said that the media needs a better way to handle interviews with her. “An interview with Conway is like a game of Crazy Eights with one rule change: Every card is crazy,” he wrote recently. “No matter what you say, she’ll pick a word from your question and use it to change suits.”
Some journalists and media analysts have even argued that new outlets should stop interviewing Conway altogether, since she rarely seems to confine herself to the facts (or even the “alternative facts,” as she put it in one interview after the inauguration). And her antipathy for the press, they say, raises questions about the Trump administration’s commitment to the First Amendment.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen recommended recently that media organizations should stop putting Conway on the air, because neither they nor the viewers actually get anything out of the process that makes it worthwhile.
“T]he logic is, this is a representative of the president. This is somebody who can speak for the Trump administration,” Rosen said during a podcast with Recode’s Peter Kafka. “But if we find that what Kellyanne Conway says is routinely or easily contradicted by Donald Trump, then that rationale disappears. It’s not just lying or spin… it’s that when you are done listening to Kellyanne Conway, you probably understand less. That’s a problem.”
The hard part for media organizations is that the more they argue with or fact-check or even stop interviewing Conway and other members of the Trump team, the more the Trump White House can paint them as one-sided or antagonistic or untrustworthy. And that plays right into the hands of senior Trump strategist and former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon.