The press is in a pickle.
Part of our job, especially for reporters, is to act as something of a filter between politicians and the public.
Then along came Donald J. Trump.
Since the very beginning of his candidacy for the Republican nomination to his current position as the president-elect, his communication to the American people has been unorthodox: carried through social media instead of traditional media, and with a fair bit of flair and hyperbole.
In short, as Republican strategist Brad Todd says, Trump doesn’t treat language the way traditional politicians do, and journalists keep falling into his trap because, like the traditional politicians they cover, they assume the message has been honed and crafted for public consumption and the precise language chosen carefully.
“Trump still takes the same offhand approach to verbal description as he would in hawking a condo tower that’s yet to be designed. And more than enough voters don’t seem to mind,” Todd said.
And a healthy amount of his supporters don’t seem to mind not only that he does it, but that it makes the press squirm. Indeed, there’s something else going on here: The relationship between the press and the Trump-voting public has been turned on its head.
Trump supporters were mercilessly vilified and ridiculed throughout this entire campaign. They were called racists, bigots, uneducated, hilljacks with serious women issues and likely living in a trailer on the government’s dime.
And most of them have no idea what the press is talking about when they reference the “alt-right” other than the imagery that makes it appear as though everyone who supported Trump likely has a Nazi flag in their basement and holds secret fascist meetings every other Tuesday.
And so journalists flew in from the coasts and lectured them instead of conversing with them, their reporting dripping with condescension. This applied to Trump, too: Pundits, academics and journalists pointed to his supposed intellectual deficiencies.
But now the shoe’s on the other foot. Trump obviously knew what he was doing; he won. And his voters could’ve explained it to reporters who had an honest interest in understanding the Trump phenomenon.
The press, in other words, turned out to be the painfully uninformed ones.
Three weeks later, that’s still evident by the obsession with Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote. For a body of professionals who love to scold Americans about their lack of knowledge, reporters apparently don’t even know the basics of the American electoral system.
Hillary did, which is why she tried to win the Electoral College and not some nonexistent “national vote.” But the media can’t seem to accept even the possibility this just happened.
Hence, the condescension. Trump supporters were treated as dopey and irrelevant. But they made the traditional media look silly — and now Trump, in his insistence on communicating with the public directly through social media, and without a filter, is making them look irrelevant.
And journalists are contributing to it by doing what they did during the campaign: writing stories and basing interviews off Trump’s Twitter musings.
“Journalists penning endless tweets pointing out Trump’s contradictory statements are wasting the time of the readers and viewers who have decided that’s not what matters with this particular president-elect,” said Todd.
That doesn’t mean reporters must ignore Trump’s online stream of consciousness, especially if there’s something genuinely controversial in it. But remember, voters and our readers and viewers more often than not see Trump’s Twitter feed as the president-elect thinking out loud.
The assignment most journalists covering Trump should take on is to get into the head of their readers who don’t live in Washington, DC, or New York — and that’s a much easier task if those journalists aren’t based in Washington or New York.
During the campaign, the media’s attitude toward Middle Americans was, essentially: There’s a great big world out there — explore it! Well, physician, heal thyself. The press’ motto from here on out should take a page from Southwest Airlines: “You are now free to move about the country.” And when you talk to Americans you used to simply fly over, please excuse their condescension.