From complaints over bias by the president, to carping among themselves over who gets questions and accusations of lobbing softballs, the last thing journalists and their bosses should be doing is denigrating colleagues, such as happened to Sinclair’s Scott Thuman this week when he asked an on-point question of the president.
After President Trump’s mini-press conference Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, The New York Times and Associated Press published similar stories that suggested that Trump was purposely avoiding comment on the stories of the day — the fate of national security advisor Michael Flynn and a North Korean missile launch — by calling on two reporters who could be counted on to toss softballs Trump’s way.
The stories resonated with me because one of the reporters was Scott Thuman of Sinclair’s ABC affiliate WJLA Washington. The other was Kaitlan Collins of The Daily Caller, a website founded in 2010 by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.
“A News Conference Filters Out Tough Questions,” declared the headline in the Times, while the AP called the questions “non-challenging.”
Both characterizations are unfair to Thuman and Collins. They are insulting, too. No reporter wants to hear that he or she is in the bag for a politician they are covering.
They posed perfectly good questions that were, significantly, on point — Canadian-U.S. relations. Thuman wanted to know how Trump and Trudeau were going to be able to get along, given their “notable” ideological differences. Trump blew off the question, but Thuman couldn’t help that. All good pols are adept at ignoring or talking around questions that don’t want to answer.
According to the Times, Thuman issued a statement afterward saying he was prepared to ask about Flynn, but decided not to because he figured others would. “Anyone familiar with me or my reporting knows it to be unbiased, free of agenda, and unafraid to ask questions.”
It’s demeaning that he had to defend himself. He should have told other reporters who didn’t like his question — his professional rivals — to go F themselves.
Of course, the real objection of the AP and Times stories is not the toughness of the questions, but the questioners themselves. They were not them — the grand and ancient pooh-bahs of the press room. They’re the ones that are supposed to be asking the questions because they know best.
Their deeper concern is that Trump is flooding the newsroom with second-rate and, in many cases, Trump-friendly news outlets to dilute their influence — all part of the president’s larger campaign to discredit the “mainstream media” that take their adversarial role seriously and that have been on his case since he descended into the presidential campaign on that escalator in 2015.
It’s a legitimate concern.
The White House has been inviting in sketchy pro-Trump outlets like Gateway Pundit, which, according to a profile in Politico this week, has run stories with such headlines as “EXPOSED: Hillary Hitman Breaks Silence,” “Dental Expert: Hillary Clinton Is Suffering From Serious Gum Infection” and “One Week After Election Loss Hillary Clinton Looks Like Death.”
They should have no place at the White House with their ability to steal time at press conferences from serious reporters like the AP’s David Bauder, The Times’ Mark Landler and, yes, Scott Thuman.
However, I do like that Trump is opening up the White House to news outlets like Sinclair that may have been marginalized in the past or are simply new to the national scene. I particularly like the so-called Skype seats that allow reporters in the provinces to ask questions at Sean Spicer’s press briefings.
By the way, the first to seize the opportunity was Kimbery Kalunian at Nexstar’s WPRI Providence, R.I. She, too, asked a qood question: about whether and when Trump would make good on his vow to cut off federal grants to sanctuary cities like Providence. She was going after the local angle on a national story.
I say this, understanding that Trump’s motivation is less democratic than it is politically motivated. Much of his base is in the provinces, in second- and third-tier cities served by station groups like Nexstar and Sinclair and small newspapers.
And for all Trump’s press room manipulations, real or imagined, and all the carping about them, the week played out well for the White House press corps and its need for presidential attention.
Yes, Trump managed to avoid questions he didn’t want to answer at press conferences with Trudeau and later in the week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by avoiding reporters who had matters other than Canada and Israel on their minds.
But on Thursday, he took on all comers in a 77-minute, no-holds-bar press conference. I find little to admire in Trump, but a couple of things I do are his fearlessness and combativeness. The guy hung in there even when he was called out for once again grossly inflating the size of his election victory.
Maybe that will be his policy going forward. He restricts press conferences with heads of state to questions about the state, but gives everybody a crack at him on any topic for an hour each month. That would be better than Obama, who, according to the American Presidency Project, went mano a mano with the press just 69 times in the 96 months of his administration.
However, I’m not real hopeful about that. Trump went six months in 2016 without a full-power press conference, despite his insistence that he enjoys the give and take.
Now back to Scott Thuman.
It’s just not the AP and Times that are undermining his legitimacy as a White House reporter; it’s his own employer, Sinclair.
Sinclair has a long history of supporting Republicans and conservative causes. Many of its stations (but notably not WJLA) carry Mark Hyman’s pointed right-wing commentaries on national issues. And Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi ran a compelling story in December alleging that Sinclair headquarters had distributed a slew of “must-run” pro-Trump stories to stations during the campaign.
As I wrote last fall, broadcasters now enjoy a relatively high degree of confidence among the public and the best way to keep that trust in by not spewing opinions on controversial public issue, of which there are way many already. But Sinclair simply cannot resist.
This week, Scott Jones’ cranky industry website FTV Live published a leaked memo that Sinclair news VP Scott Livingston distributed to his troops. The memo was prompted by what he said was a “troubling trend” in stations’ news and personal social media posts — “one-sided political coverage.” By that, he clearly meant liberal political coverage. In fact, Sinclair’s WWMT Kalamazoo, Mich., fired an executive producer for taking some anti-administration shots on Twitter.
On its surface, it was a call for news objectivity in a politically charged age. “This is potentially perilous to our profession because when viewers and readers lose trust in us, they stop consuming the news we produce.”
But on closer examination is appears that what Livingston was really doing was cautioning them against liberal bias and asking them to become counterweights to the what he perceives as the liberal media. “I want to make sure you’re taking time to review with your team the importance of understanding our commitment to tracking the truth and challenging the accepted narrative in the mainstream media.”
The only thing the Sinclair reporters and producers should be challenging is the official statements of public officials, especially the ones now inhabiting the White House.
Livingston goes on to say: “We will not tolerate any deviation from our goal to provide fair and balanced coverage. “Fair and balanced” is Fox News-speak for the conservative point of view. Livingston can’t possibly be ignorant on how loaded that phrase is.
Finally, he says that Sinclair Chairman David Smith “has received complaints from board members who have received call about biased coverage.”
Livingston is out of line here. It’s his job to shield reporters and producer from owners and manager and their political and business agendas, not use them as veiled threats.
The history, the Hyman commentaries, the Livingston memo — it all gives the grand pooh-bahs of the White House press corps ammunition with which to dismiss Sinclair’s White House reporter as just another Trump lap dog along with the hack from Gateway Pundit.
Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
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