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Media Stars Agree to Off-the-Record Meeting With Trump, Break Agreement, Whine About Mistreatment
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/22/media-stars-agree-to-off-the-record-meeting-with-trump-break-agreement-whine-about-mistreatment/Glenn Greenwald
November 22 2016, 7:26 a.m.
A GLITTERING ARRAY of media stars and network executives made pilgrimage on Monday to the 25th floor of Trump Tower to meet with the president-elect. They all agreed that the discussions would be “off the record”: meaning they would conceal from their viewers what they discussed. Shortly after the meeting ended, several of the stars violated the agreement they made, running to the New York Post and David Remnick of the New Yorker to whine about Trump’s mean behavior. “The participants all shook Trump’s hand at the start of the session and congratulated him,” Remnick reported, “but things went south from there.” It’s difficult to identify the shabbiest and sorriest aspect of this spectacle, but let’s nonetheless try, as it sheds important light on our nation’s beloved media corps and their posture heading into a Trump presidency.
To begin with, why would journalistic organizations agree to keep their meeting with Donald Trump off the record? If you’re a journalist, what is the point of speaking with a powerful politician if you agree in advance that it’s all going to be kept secret? Do they not care what appearance this creates: the most powerful media organizations meeting high atop Trump Tower with the country’s most powerful political official, with everyone agreeing to keep it all a big secret from the public? Whether or not it actually is collusion, whether or not it actually is subservient ring-kissing in exchange for access, it certainly appears to be that. As the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone put it: “By agreeing to such conditions, journalists expected to deliver the news to the public must withhold details of a newsworthy meeting with the president-elect.”
The pretext these media stars offer for such meetings is unpersuasive in the extreme. “Oh, we need,” they claim, “to negotiate access and how we’re going to work together, and this discussion can be productive only if everyone is confident that it won’t be reported.” But why do media organizations need to have cooperative access agreements with politicians? Just report on and investigate what he says and does. Don’t agree to ground rules that limit or subvert your ability to report aggressively. Don’t turn yourselves into vassals in order to be granted access to the royal court.
More to the point, nobody really believes that a discussion that takes place in a room filled with a couple dozen TV stars and their media bosses is going to be kept private, so the “off-the-record” agreement does not actually foster candor. It’s instead designed to achieve nothing other than creating a cozy atmosphere where — just as they do at the sleazy, Versailles-like White House Correspondents’ Dinner and on so many other occasions — media stars get to feel like they’re colleagues and friends with the president rather than his adversaries.
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