The premise of this article is that Donald Trump, by virtue of his willingness to openly lie about facts and shift whatever positions he might take not just from one day to the next, but within the same speech or, sometimes, sentence, has broken the press. Specifically, he has broken the sacred Interview, upon which all modern journalism rests.
Trump has defeated the interview by ignoring the impersonal social control it thrusts upon its subjects. Adopting a policy of maximum self-contradiction, he made a practice of reversing himself when expressing something as fact, frustrating his monitors. For example, one day in March he told ABC’s Good Morning America that he had seen a TV ad criticizing him. Minutes later he told NBC’s Today program that he hadn’t seen the ad. One day he says he’ll pay for the legal fees of supporters who punch protesters, the next day he says, “I didn’t say that.”
In other words, because Trump simply lies about his stances and stubbornly refuses to admit it, his interviewers are left powerless. The mighty institution of the press has never had to deal with someone who has no perceptible shame; however can we persevere against fraudulence of this magnitude?
I'm not buying it. Yes, it is true that Donald Trump lies shamelessly—but a flip through any of the Sunday news shows would seem to put him in good company. A weekly staple of the cable news networks is the remote feed from our nation's Congress, where a steady stream of elected representatives drop in for a few minutes of the least hard-hitting journalism one could possibly imagine. Those are a reliable source not merely of flawed facts but of outright conspiracy theories, and yet there was nobody writing articles about how Rep. Michele Bachmann was destroying the sanctity of the interview by spouting unimpeded gibberish.
Probably the worst violations of the holy sacrament of the interview have long been the omnipresent "interviews" with think-tank denizens and editorial page pundits and, especially, the handsomely paid issue advocates who are summoned onto our airwaves or onto the printed page under the banner of expertise, upon which they freely billow out factless clouds of chaff that bears uncanny relation to the immediate publicity needs of whichever industry has recently cut them a fat check. There is not even the slightest attempt to rebut those maulers of the sacred interview—in fact, the current practice is for the "journalist" who summoned this or that dark demon for a few juicy if shamelessly misleading quotes, to shuffle themselves off to the sidelines, leaving the duties of rebuttal or fact-checking–if there is any to be had at all–to a second simultaneous interviewee of better or worser morality.
The duties of the interviewer in these sequences is to act as game show host. It is up to the contestants to make their case, but a politician or pundit or other "thought leader" who fabricates their case wholesale will be rebutted only by their fellow contestants, never by the news team that collected them there to fight like spiders in a glass jar.
So yes, it is true that Donald Trump willingly says things that are absolutely untrue in his interviews. What, in the modern techniques and practices of journalisms, do we expect would have dissuaded him?
The immediate example given is of the Donald Trump-Megan Kelly interview, a tension-free celebration of the lying candidate (followed by a one hour fête of his overgroomed family that looked more like a production of North Korean television than of any supposed attempt at journalism here at home.) Donald Trump lied during his interview. Kelly valiantly confronted him with it. Trump responded by lying again. Kelly, her duty done and with many more minutes of tape to somehow fill, abandoned the effort and moved on. That was the end of it.
Trump is hardly the first interviewee to have mastered this defense-through-filibuster. He was not even the first interviewee to get away with a fraudulent statement that day, on that network or any other. Why should he do otherwise?
Let's take the premise at face value. All right, Donald Trump has singularly broken the "interview." What should the response be? Here is a man who freely and openly lies to the American people during nearly every appearance. Let us stipulate that that is bad, both for journalism and, more to the point, for ostensible democracy.
And? Is that it, then? He has figured out the fatal weakness of the modern practice of journalism, which is that obtaining an interview with a powerful person is considered the journalistic end, not the journalistic means; having the subject say words at the camera or at the reporter is the story; what that person says will be the quote in the headline; judging whether any of it is true may make it into the fifth or sixth paragraph, in print, and will matter Not A Damn Bit in front of the lens.
If an interviewee lies to their audience, should a network hold them to account? Was that not the original premise—that powerful figures would be afraid to lie to the nation, lest they face the humiliation of being proven a liar?
We presume Trump is unique in his indifference to being held to account on his lies. Is that true, or is Trump merely keenly aware that any such critique will pass over him and move on, like Megyn Kelly's, before the next commercial break? Trump is a known, avid, irresponsible liar—with this knowledge, how will journalists treat him during his next interview? With deference, as if none of the previous lies ever happened.
As I said, the premise here is flawed. We are presuming that Donald Trump is somehow unique in his gall—a sociopath—when copious amounts of gall is the precise calling card of a great many other professional interviewees that clog the same networks with the very same fraudulent "facts" and spurious claims that Trump himself cribs to craft his own pronouncements. It would seem the shallow and without-morals Donald Trump would be the very easiest of all of them to dispatch. Summoning up a list of his lies in order to prove his untrustworthy nature would be shooting fish in a barrel.
If, that is, any of the journalists who put microphones or television cameras in front of him felt a journalistic obligation to do it.
And yet here we are. How is this Trump's fault?