Media has lost credibility in its attacks on Donald Trump
Caroline Overington
Associate Editor
- October 12, 2018
I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump’s penis and probably you don’t either. I do want to talk about the degradation of one of the important institutions in American life, so I suppose we have to go there.
Readers are perhaps aware that this week Stormy Daniels — her pen and porn name — has been promoting her memoir, in which she says she had an affair with Trump in 2006.
He wasn’t president then. He was host of
Celebrity Apprentice and he has denied Daniels’s claims. To bolster her case, Daniels offers in her book a description of Trump’s private parts in terms as vulgar as you may imagine. Many thought this hilarious, others frankly discourteous.
On the Nine Network’s
60 Minutes last Sunday, Daniels was contrite, saying she now wished she hadn’t included those details.
“I actually feel pretty terrible about it,” she told reporter Liz Hayes. “Because in a way it’s body shaming.”
OK, but which time did she feel terrible? Daniels has been offering to tell this story for money for at least a half-decade, although until now nobody has touched it.
“I can describe his junk perfectly,” Daniels told
InTouch magazine during an interview conducted in 2011, published only now during what might be described as the Trump free-for-all. “And the penis wasn’t big?” asked the interlocutor. “I don’t want to shame anybody,” Daniels cried, throwing her hands into the air. Oh, please.
That was precisely what Daniels has long been prepared to do, provided she got paid, and maybe you’re thinking: well, go, girl. That’s capitalism, baby.
It’s likewise difficult to mount a case for Trump’s right to privacy in this regard, because wasn’t it Trump himself who put penis size on the record? Yes, during a Fox News Republican presidential debate in 2016, he spread his palms out, saying: “Look at these hands. Are they small hands? And if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you, there’s no problem.”
Also, debate about the performance and predilections of the presidential penis isn’t unique to the Trump White House. Monica Lewinsky has spoken in paid interviews and in a book about her affair with Bill Clinton (his semen, her dress, his cigar, her knees). A description of Clinton’s penis — “it has distinguishing characteristics” — was provided by Paula Jones during her sexual harassment suit. We were spared, at least, the introduction to a court of the exhibit.
The point, I guess, is that while some believe the publication of Daniels’s memoir marks the absolute mortification of one of America’s finest institutions — the office of the presidency — we have been here before. No doubt we’ll be here again.
What is new is the degradation of an arguably more important American institution: the fourth estate, which pounces with glee on any and every story that may paint Trump in poor light.
Now, let’s be clear: many aspects of Daniels’s story are undoubtedly newsworthy. She says she was paid off, and Trump’s lawyer will plead guilty to a felony in this regard. That’s a good yarn. If Trump approved the payment, it’s a great yarn.
But the fourth estate isn’t interested only in great yarns. It’s taking anything it can get on Trump in a concerted effort to destroy him, with the worst example surely being a decision by
The New York Times on September 5 to publish an opinion piece by “Anonymous” on its front page.
In case you missed it — you can’t have missed it — Anonymous described himself as part of “the resistance” within Trump’s White House. He was, he said, working “to frustrate parts of Trump’s agenda”.
Put aside for a moment that nothing Anonymous had to say about Trump’s administration was new. The White House under his leadership is chaotic; the man himself is an ignoramus? Do tell.
What sticks in the craw is the conceit at the heart of the episode or, rather, in the heart of the self-aggrandising source. This man — odds on, Anonymous will be a man — was not elected to the White House. On what authority, in whose name, does he act?
Anonymous feigns loyalty to the nation yet we know he is a traitor to those who have employed him. We — the interested public — cannot verify or dispute what he says because we don’t know who he is.
The New York Times, lashed to a totem of arrogance, declines to tell us. Unlike the President, Anonymous is not required to explain his actions or defend his decisions. Never will he be held accountable at the ballot box for his performance.
This, as
The New York Times surely knows, is untenable in a democracy. The newspaper attempted to justify its decision to publish the opinion piece in an editor’s note, which can be summarised thusly: We don’t publish anonymous shit sheets, except when we do.
We wouldn’t normally present unverified information from anonymous sources as fact, but we really don’t like this guy. Generally speaking, we hold the powerful to account, but not in this case because we kind of approve of the skulduggery.
Own goal? You know it.
It isn’t only
The New York Times that has reneged on its responsibilities in covering the Trump White House. Salacious gossip and unfounded rumours about Trump, his associates, his children, his parents and now his Supreme Court nominee have been published in pretty much every US newspaper, on television and more recently in books, including Michael Wolff’s
Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s
Fear.
Nearly all of the reporting in those two books is based on anonymous sources. Unverified and unverifiable.
But that’s OK because they’re believable, right?
Well, sure, but since when is that the standard? The bar for anonymous sources was once Watergate high, and urgently needs raising. It isn’t possible to drop one’s standards without, well, dropping one’s standards.
In covering Trump’s presidency this way, the fourth estate reveals not his but its own perversions. His opponents complain enthusiastically about the damage being done to the White House, the legislature and the US Supreme Court, but in fact the media — once an essential pillar of democracy — is now the wobbliest leg on the table.
The press in the West sets its own standards. That is right, and must never change, but it is also meaningful only if the press agrees also to uphold and defend those standards as if its reputation depends on them, because, hey, guess what, it does.