The Trump administration’s insistence on establishing falsehoods as truths poses unprecedented challenges for the working media and the country. Truth is the bedrock for democracies, falsehoods the staple for dictatorships, banana republics and failed states, writes Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times, January 22, 2017. Trump administration strategy features slamming the news media and playing on the public’s low opinion of the press, but Rutenberg warns that maintaining credibility with the people mounts in importance as Trump deals with more crucial issues than the disputed size of the inaugural crowd.
Trump spokespersons claim there are no facts leaving reporters with an even more than usual difficult task of speaking truth to power. “Whether you like Trump or not, it’s demonstrably true that he says things that are easily proved false, over and over again. The question the media has regularly confronted is not whether Trump’s facts are correct but whether to say he’s deliberately lying or not,” writes Aaron Blake for The Washington Post, January 22, 2017. Blake quotes a memo from someone claiming to have worked in the White House explaining the Trump press conference strategy. “If Trump’s White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this [inauguration crowd numbers], just imagine what else they’ll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of,” reads the memo.
Jack Shafer of Politico, January 23, 2017, argues that countering Trump’s extraordinary assault on the truth does not call for extraordinary measures but rather “the meticulous, aggressive, and calm presentation of the news.” He offers the example of The Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold’s spadework to reveal the bogus nature of the Trump Foundation as a philanthropic asset. Shafer considers the Trump administration extreme but not essentially different from the Obama administration that had its own ways of denying assess and shaping coverage.
Margaret Sullivan in The Washington Post, January 20, 2017, says that Trump has put the nail in the coffin of “access journalism” defined as sessions where official statements “are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news.” She agrees with Shafer that the only course of action is hard slogging, intense news reporting. She says the only response to Trump’s denigration of the press is to rise above it and do the job of reporting in a responsible, fair and fearless way.