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How to Cover Trump? Literally and Seriously

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Facing the looming realities of President Donald Trump, media outlets have been chewing nervously on an unusual question: How do we cover this guy?

Of course, although one would be hard-pressed to name any president who has made the reporter's life easy, none until now have been known to taunt the press -- and urge their supporters to join them -- as eagerly and unpredictably as Trump has done on Twitter.

But the chilliness in Trump's media relations almost iced over amid reports a few days before his swearing-in that press secretary Sean Spicer was considering pulling news media offices out of the White House.

After reporters put up a howl, Trump said in the friendly confines of "Fox and Friends" he decided not to move the press briefings, even though he still wanted more room to invite more reporters. The reporters, he said in a mocking tone, will "be begging for a much larger room very soon. You watch." Ha, ha.

What anti-media mischief will he try next? He's banned some news organizations from covering him. He has openly praised the idea of loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue media.

He has flouted the norms of regular pool reporting and news conferences. He has herded his traveling reporters into a pen at his rallies and jeered them as "scum," "absolutely dishonest" and other choice Trumpisms, just to thrill the crowd.

 

Such antics only underscore the goofy relationship between Trump and the media that Salena Zito captured so well in her Trump coverage for The Atlantic: "(The) press takes him literally but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously but not literally."

Zito described an old and vastly underappreciated quirk of human nature. Journalists are conditioned to value facts as closely tied to one's credibility. Trump talks like a stand-up comedian or the family yarn-spinner. He mangles facts in a way that sounds to willing ears like it has touched a deeper truth.

So how, the media community asks itself, should reporters cover the presidency of Donald Trump who, as the Columbia Journalism Review recently observed, operates like a media organization himself?

I think that, despite the new bells and whistles of this digital age, the fundamentals of covering presidents or any other public servant still apply.

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(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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