Trump Thinks Journalists Should Act Like Publicists and Ghostwriters

[applegrove]

http://www.vulture.com/2017/01/trump-thinks-journalists-should-be-publicists.html

Vulture

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Every entertainment journalist will, sooner or later, be told by a PR representative, “Hey, we’re all in the same business here.” For the journalists and quasi-journalists Trump encountered during his decade-long run as The Apprentice’s star and co-producer, that was uncomfortably close to the truth. Trump thought they needed him more than he needed them, and believed that if they stepped out of line or off of the publicity game plan, he could punish them by cutting them off. And the evidence he chose to see backed him up. For proof, you have only to think back to the perfectly titled Access Hollywood and ask yourself what put Trump on that bus in the first place and allowed him to talk so freely. The answer: It was a safe space, a faux-journalistic enterprise produced by NBC, the network that aired The Apprentice, in which different house rules prevailed. The “interview” was a publicity segment, the “journalist” was a douchey wingman, the actress unwittingly roped into being their tour guide was a performer on Days of Our Lives, an NBC daytime soap on which Trump was about to do a cameo, which would help Days of Our Lives, which would help The Apprentice, which would help Access Hollywood. Hey, we’re all in the same business here.

This is Trump’s understanding of journalism; it’s the bubble in which he lived for the decade before his campaign began, and it shocks and enrages him when journalism decides to be something other than flattery-for-access. And his team, many members of which are committed to turning his imagined reality into actual reality, is doing everything it can to support his viewpoint. I thought of The Apprentice on Sunday, when Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway, flashing a menacing smile from the White House North Lawn, appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday to insist that Sean Spicer’s lies were “alternate facts” and to drop this bomb on Chuck Todd when he used the word “falsehood”: “Chuck,” she said, “if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here.”

That threat — be nice or we’ll cut you off — should be meaningful to someone covering reality television, but less so to someone covering reality. In the world Trump comes from, access is everything, and a request for it is the start of a negotiation. That belief is corroborated by the journalistic medium to which Trump pays the most attention, cable news — but only up to a point of stalemate: If there’s a permanent blowout between the Trump White House and, say, Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, the White House will always be able to find other newscasts on which to place its spokespeople, but Cooper will always be able to find other on-camera bodies to tell the stories he wants to tell. The truth about TV news and politicians is that neither side has the power to destroy the other purely by withholding, and both sides know it. At least, they used to. Conway seemed to think her threat to choke off Meet the Press carried force. But how could it, coming from a White House that already appears to be the leakiest in recent memory?

Trump’s relationship with journalism is, even at this early stage of his presidency, weirdly bifurcated. Negative press infuriates him; journalists, to him, are publicists, and publicists who sully his reputation are failing at their jobs and therefore must be either punished or retconned out of existence in a world in which (here’s the bifurcation; see today’s press release) everything he is doing is deeply appreciated and winning widespread media praise! The problem is that you can’t execute the latter reality if you keep acknowledging the former one, as Trump feels unable to stop himself from doing. There is no evidence that he has the temperament or self-control not to lash out (or have surrogates do it) when he sees or reads something that he doesn’t like — and there's ample evidence to the contrary.


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[C_U_L8R]

1. The journalists Trump is used to write for Page Six.

Not really journalists at all.

Trump's in for a big surprise as every word and action
comes under righteous and professional scrutiny.