Ever since Donald Trump appeared on Campaign 2016’s horizon, journalists have been imploring other journalists not to cover him. This began, amazingly, five months before he announced he was running for president, when Conor Friedersdorf laid down the dictum in the Atlantic. Just last week, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown bookended Friedersdorf’s argument with a piece in POLITICO, calling upon TV news to stage a one-week Trump moratorium because TV coverage was only making him stronger.
“TV turns [Trump] on and only TV can turn him off,” Brown wrote. “Let’s stop being complicit in promoting his hateful and harmful demagoguery. Just for one week.”
Additional recent fretting about the Trump coverage: On Sunday, Brian Stelter wrestled with Campbell’s proposal on his show, Reliable Sources; over the weekend, NPR solicited the views of three top Washington editors last week on the topic; and last week in the Boston Globe, columnist Joanna Weiss called on the Republican Party to eject Trump from the next debate. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy asked, “Is there a way, short of deliberately restricting his television appearances, to insure that he doesn’t have it his own way?” Trump coverage complaints are coming from inside the building, too: CNN producers grumbled about all the Trump obsession to network President Jeff Zucker at a company town hall, as The Wrap reported in September.
The logic behind the Trump blackout proposals vary, but usually boils down to this: Any attention given to his retrograde “ideas” only end up giving his candidacy additional velocity. But just because Trump is a potential menace to society — “hateful” and a demagogue, according to Brown, “a novelty act with a one-note message, playing a game with the media and the electoral process,” writes Weiss — why does that mean TV should give him the blind eye? The more hateful and demagogic a politician the more you should cover him, right? Imagine that in January 1954, when Sen. Joe McCarthy’s approval rating hit its peak, McCarthy’s critics had urged the TV press to stop covering the senator for a week because all the attention was feeding the man’s diseased ego and expanding his reach. Or how about making a similar pitch in 1972, when the vile tub-thumper George Wallace was winning Democratic Party presidential primaries across the land (Michigan!). As if placing McCarthy and Wallace out of sight would have rendered them out of mind.
Any attention given to his retrograde “ideas” only end up giving his candidacy additional velocity.
The working premise behind the Trump ban seems to be that journalists should avoid stories that have a potential to make things “worse” (i.e., increase Trump support) and instead produce stories that have a potential to make things “better” (i.e., a decrease in Trump support). But a journalist’s primary duty isn’t to produce stories that push history in the “correct” direction — whatever that is— or to self-censor anything that might possibly encourage a “bad” outcome. Sometimes newsgathering stimulates a happy result, but it’s not the only way to judge the worthiness of a story.
A broad calculus goes into what a news outlet decides to cover, including but not limited to, what the audience is interested in, what the editors are interested in, and what the reporters are interested in. To ask TV networks (and other outlets) to limit their coverage of Trump because it might be advantageous to Trump stimulates this question: Who would call for a reduction of Hillary Clinton coverage simply because it might benefit her candidacy?
Brown’s variety of high-mindedness went on display at the Huffington Post last July, when its editors declared Trump’s campaign a “sideshow” and moved its coverage of him from the politics section to entertainment, “next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.” This segregation of coverage, of course, did nothing to slow the Trump candidacy. Last week, as Brown was composing her anti-Trump coverage piece, the Huffington Post was recognizing the error of its ways, as Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington announced that Trump would once again be in the news department because of his transparent “xenophobia,” “scapegoating,” “misogyny,” and “lies.”
Without getting nihilistic about it, journalism is neither a utopian endeavor nor an exact science. It’s a messy, chaotic process, and that’s a good thing: editors and reporters routinely reject efforts by outsiders to steer their coverage, and sometimes even reject each others’ efforts. When barred by their bosses from pursuing a story they believe in, journalists can be relied upon to leak what they know to a competitor or find some other way to inject it into the news stream. They are, face it, bratty kids. As Bob Woodward puts it, “All good work is done in defiance of management.”
One danger posed by a Trump ban is that it would encourage conspiracy theorists to think that the entire press works like a cartel — that a call comes down from above, dictating what can and can’t be covered. Which is dead wrong. The second is this: A one-week ban might discourage the press from reporting something vital about Trump, something we’ll wish we had known before he became president. At this point in the campaign, we can’t really be damaged by knowing too much.
The notion that the press has dreadfully overcovered or tragically undercovered a topic is the idiot’s version of press criticism. No perfect dose of journalism can be prescribed for every subject. But if you still think that the TV news operations are overcovering Donald Trump, I have a simple suggestion. Unplug your television instead of asking the news channels to turn off their cameras.
Jack Shafer is POLITICO‘s senior media writer.