White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

War on Media: Now Trump Wants Our Credentials

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Oh, dear! President Trump has hinted that journalists should lose their credentials. He probably means the passes which allow journalists to enter the White House complex at the Northwest Gate and to walk to the briefing room a few hundred yards away.

Over the decades, successive administrations — in my accounting, starting with Jimmy Carter — have reduced the amount of freedom journalists enjoy inside the White House fence. It has been whittled away to the token that it is today. Jousting with the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, is not freedom to gather the news.

A reporter used to be able to walk around the complex without an escort and meet with White House staff in the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) without an escort.

More important, when you had an appointment in the West Wing, the nerve center of any administration, once you were through the door, you were at liberty to sit in the corridor before or after your appointment and often someone would invite you in for an unscheduled chat. At least, that was my experience and it was invaluable. You and they learned things. It was a two-way flow.

Incidentally, you did not need one of the prized “hard passes” to do that. Even now, in a time of restriction, a journalist does not need a hard pass to cover a briefing. You can get cleared through the gate by that part of the White House communications operation known as the Lower Press Office. You need pretty good identification like a congressional press pass, which are issued by standing committees of journalists covering Congress; sometimes just a passport or driver’s license.

Trump’s tweet about credentials suggests he believes all reporters need these to do their jobs. Fact is credentials are useful but not essential. Indeed, I question the emphasis on credentials in Washington because they hint at the licensing of journalists, devoutly to be avoided and contested — a constitutional violation under the First Amendment.

Credentials are a game subject to abuse: the very abuse Trump hints at.

It has even been suggested, by the George W. Bush and other administrations, that the press should be kicked out of the White House and given a briefing room in a nearby government building. One of the major values of being inside the White House fence is to garner interviews in the driveway with important visitors — to be able to file on the spot with authenticity and to be a constant, if thorny, reminder to the White House, any White House, that the eyes and ears of the world are feet away.

The damage that Trump has done to the media and by extension to this liberal democracy, is the ceaseless denigration. In 2017, 46 journalists were killed around the world – 26 so far this year — for just doing their jobs. Death in the line of duty is not “fake.”

What is the reporting job? It was best encapsulated by my friend Dan Raviv when he was with CBS News Radio. He said, “I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Quite so.

Trump makes that simple idea of finding out what is going on and telling people more difficult and sometimes dangerous. Trump’s daily assault on the media has encouraged all of those with something to hide: those who are cheating, lying, torturing, killing and suppressing the freedom of others. He is damaging the body politic here and in other countries.

Journalism maybe a feeble light but it is a light. For many it is last hope for justice, the ultimate appellate court and the hope that they will be heard.

Trump’s relentless undermining comes at the worst of times for the journalism we have known. Newspapers are gasping, television is losing advertisers and viewers. If all this were not sobering enough, many are demanding that the great new forces for disseminating journalistic output, Google and Facebook, should practice censorship. Shame.

Finding out what’s going on and telling people is hard enough without Trump’s dangerous disparagement — and politically correct censorship.

 

Photo: White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders takes questions from reporters at the White House, Friday, October 27, 2017. Editorial credit: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock.com

The New Language of the New Trumpian Politics

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President Trump may or may not have done good things in his first 100 days in office. But have no doubt, he has affected the language of politics, uprooted the tried-and-true meanings of the past for a new more ambiguous, fluid and hazier speech.

These words and phrases are the language of the day:

Takeaways: These are the facts which you try and sort out from the presidential utterances. Takeaways mostly are the nuggets, the nub, the likely policy in the mattress of words. Takeaways are nearly as good as facts, but not quite as tricky. Takeaways don’t have to be facts, they can be hints, even insults or praise, which indicate which way the presidential wind is blowing; whether it is a zephyr or a gale, a wind of change or just hot air.

Double down: This is when President Trump or his staff cling to a position for a while. For example, the president has doubled down on his demand for wall along the southern border. He has not wavered in his desire to see masonry separating us from Mexico, from the bad hombres there who have never heard of airplanes, boats or Canada. A fence won’t do; nor will an electronic barrier. It has to be a wall, like Hadrian’s Wall, separating England from Scotland, or the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall. History loves walls. History doesn’t do fences.

Walk back: Walking back statements, positions, accusations and policies is a kind of wiggle room on steroids. If it stirs up a storm, walk it back. If the historical facts you’ve quoted are pure nonsense, walk them back. If your international agenda has changed, walk back the old one.

Take the strange matter of Chinese currency manipulation. Candidate Trump was going to straighten out that one. But when he needed the Chinese to pressure North Korea, he walked back the issue of currency manipulation. He also did a few backward steps on Chinese incursion into the South China Sea.

Historians might note that in relation to China, President Trump has traded away a lot for little or nothing. The Chinese aren’t going to topple the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or even cut off a lot of their trade with him. “Smart cookies” are in Beijing, too.

Fake news: This is the new aspirin of politics. Take two and recant in the morning. Fake news is, by presidential dictate, anything you don’t like on the news; or the entire purveyor of the news, like CNN or The New York Times. Fake has not yet lost its old meaning: It means made up, false, fictitious.

In the Land of Trump, there are no facts, except those on which he has doubled down, and which might be walked back at some time in the future.

Enemies of the people: That means journalists. All of them, if they don”t work for Fox News — and a few of those are suspect.

Now the president, the negotiator-in-chief, the man who can look across the table at an adversary and get the wretch to sign and concede, is taking on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Trump may not have negotiated the Russians into submission or the Chinese into compliance, but no matter. When at first you don’t succeed, go for the big one. Double down.

Maybe Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will walk through the Valley of Failed negotiations and succeed. But no matter. It’s a no-brainer. You can walk that one back, littering the way with accusations of intransigence and ill will. One doesn’t have to walk back failure in the Middle East. That one walks itself.

Author’s note: I’ll walk back all my negative comments as needed or, perchance, double down on them. They are, of course, fake and have been penned by a certifiable enemy of the people.

Fake News and the Winds of Hate Roil the U.S.

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By Llewellyn King

There is an ill wind blowing across the nation. Sometimes it is a foul gale, other times just a smelly zephyr. But it is as evil as it is nauseating, as noisome as it is cruel. It blights good fellowship, throttles reasonable discourse, and brings threatening clouds for the future.

Lies, insinuations, fabrications and distortions are not new to politics, but now they have an awesome delivery system: fake news on the Internet.

Fake news likely inspired a man to storm into the public library in Barrington, RI, on Nov. 10, and verbally attack a young patron. Wearing a Trump hat and T-shirt emblazoned with “Racist Cracker 88,” he approached her, chanting, “Obama is out! We control this place now!” The librarians called the police, and the man was escorted out.” To this buffoon, literacy was akin to elitism, liberalism and moral decay.

A fringe of the already fringy alt-right believes that the election victory of Donald Trump established a new order of self-righteous bigotry, as though decency has been repealed, kindness put on hold and common sense sent to the jailhouse.

A quiet block of small businesses on Connecticut Avenue in the Chevy Chase section of Washington, D.C. has become a focal point for the venomous malice of fake news on the Internet.

On one side of the road is a Washington institution: the book store Politics & Prose, a favorite place for authors to talk about their books on C-SPAN. Across the street are two neighborhood restaurants: a large family pizza place, Comet Ping Pong, and a small French bistro and craft shop, Terasol.

All three establishments have been the victims of fake news, which alleges that they are dealing in pedophilia, claiming Hillary Clinton, her presidential campaign manager, John Podesta, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who have been customers, are kidnapping children and holding them in tunnels under the pizza place.

Sabrina Ousmal, who with her husband Alan Moin, own Terasol, has also been under attack. Here, I feel a personal involvement. Ousmal worked for me for more than a decade, and she and Alan are personal friends of me and my wife, Linda Gasparello.

Alan works full-time at Terasol, while Sabrina is the assistant publisher of The Energy Daily, which I founded in 1973 and sold in 2006.

She has been besieged with hundreds of e-mails, spreading a vile story of child molestation and kidnapping and even suggesting that The Energy Daily is an alternative energy publication. Not true. It covers the electric utility industry and the government nuclear complex with dogged determination.

Politics & Prose is under attack, presumably, because the owners, Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, had worked as Washington Post reporters, and Muscatine was a speechwriter for First Lady Hillary Clinton.

The police and the FBI are on the case. But this is a new perversion of truth and the perpetrators enjoy the courage that comes from anonymity: the courage of the ultimate bully.

The implications here go far beyond one block of small businesses in Washington.

The problem as I see it is that people love to hate and once that infection has taken hold, it is resistant to cure. I have seen people warming themselves at the fires of hate around the globe; in South Africa, where the Afrikaners and the English traded in hate, as did the Xhosa and the Zulu; in Zimbabwe, where the hate was stirred by its evil president, Robert Mugabe, between his Shona people and the Ndebele.

It has been stirred up, largely by a section of the press in Britain toward the continent, particularly the French. This, in the name of sovereignty, has led to the slow, almost ritual economic suicide now playing out in London.

Hate is at work daily in the Middle East, where it is the one thing people cling to: the paradoxical love of hating. Now there is a hate front here. — For InsideSources