White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How Trump and Technology Have Turned the Press Corps From Lions to Hyenas

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Political messaging isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. It used to be that the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times were an agenda for action. This power was feared and used by successive presidents in my time, from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, but not by Donald Trump.

Before Trump, there were several ways a president spoke to the nation. He either made a speech, held a press conference or leaked an idea to one of the two newspapers that counted in the Washington firmament, The Times and The Post. If that balloon floated upward, something formal followed.

Until Bill Clinton, that was often a speech at the National Press Club, a few blocks from the White House. Clinton never gave a major speech at the Press Club. That was the end of an era, the end of the Press Club as the forum of choice for presidents and heads of state.

In Clinton’s case, this wasn’t a failing of the Press Club system; it was just that it had become cumbersome and unnecessary. Clinton said it was simpler for him to talk to the nation from the White House formally in a press conference in the East Room. Less formally, he could walk into the Brady Briefing Room, where the press was on duty all day and the network cameras were ready to roll.

Technology was changing the way news came out of the White House. While Clinton preferred press conferences or informal presentations, the two dominant newspapers were essential tools to him, as they had been and would be to other presidents until technology again changed things.

I watched the system of trial-by-leak from the Johnson through the Biden years, although things were somewhat different under Bush. There was a new newspaper in town, The Washington Times, which was avowedly conservative, which caused George W. Bush’s staff to lean that way.

However, the new paper didn’t change the system in which a top White House correspondent would be leaked a story. If it failed, it wasn’t heard about again; it would either die in the aridity of silence, or it could be mildly denied as “speculation.”

None of this was ever laid out formally, but it worked and worked for a long time. It gave the president cover and the reporter a payoff with “access.”

With Trump, things are different, primarily because of his seemingly narcotic addiction to publicity but also because technology has bypassed the media of old: the newspapers and the hungry cameras.

Trump has Truth Social, and his aides have X. He makes announcements all the time, changes direction, denies former positions and doesn’t test ideas before sharing them. It is dangerous and giddy, but clearly, it delights Trump.

It has created the kind of yo-yo of yes-no-yes-perhaps that we have seen most recently with Trump’s statements about whether he would or wouldn’t try to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The now-nightly Niagara Falls of unformed presidential thinking on Truth Social has changed the role of the press corps.

From leading the day’s news to following it, the press corps has seen its role change and its significance diminished. The media giants are now forced to follow like hyenas, not hunt like lions. They are following the hunt, not heading it.

Whereas when ideas were tested through media, presidents could be saved from some of their worst inclinations, now there is no restraint, not even the thin membrane provided by a diligent press secretary, suggesting caution or at least preceding thought.

From his early days in real estate in New York, Trump has craved publicity, grooved on it, and seen it as an end in itself more than a means to an end.

In a naive moment when the National Press Building was in financial trouble, which was at one time owned mainly by the Press Club, I suggested to some colleagues that we sell the building to Trump — not Trump the politician but pre-political Trump.

Fortunately, some of my colleagues had dealt with Trump and knew about his media bullying — he would even call into New York radio talk shows and talk about himself as though he was someone else — and warned that our lives would be hell and the club would be used by Trump, if he could, to glorify himself.

Now, we see Trump converting the Oval Office, heretofore an inner sanctum, into a kind of television studio, himself enthroned at the center.

Fact-Checking Has Always Been an Elemental Part of Journalism

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A whole new area of endeavor is opening up for the entrepreneurial. Name it after the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. He allegedly hunted for an honest man and was possibly the founder of Cynicism.

Verification will become a vital business as the flood of misinformation engulfs us. What can be trusted? What source is reliable? What image is actual? Is the voice or image authentic, or has it been created with artificial intelligence?

Rather than fact-checking becoming outdated, as at Facebook, it will be essential. The source of news will be as important as the news. Publications with a reputation for accuracy, or their equivalent in this digital free-for-all information age, will be revered.

As — whether we like it or not — we all get our current information through journalism, journalism becomes more critical, not less so.

Elon Musk, who owns X, has declared that we are all journalists now. No, we are not.

You don’t have to spend four years in a university to become a journalist, but some reverence for the craft and some on-the-job training is necessary. Skill with the language, a knowledge of history, curiosity, and a desire to find out what is going on and tell people are all needed.

So is the hardest part of the qualification to define: news judgment. This is knowing what news is and seeing it immediately. You also need to be serious about facts and fact-checking.

Fact-checking, which Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, has equated to being incompatible with free speech, is at the heart of journalism. The individual journalist is haunted by a permanent fear (“the inner core of panic,” as my late first wife, Doreen, who was a superb journalist, described it) of, “Did I get it right? Is it Steven or Stephen or did the speaker say millions or a billions?”

Any news story has many facts and judgments, most executed under pressure and in real-time. If it is essential, it needs to be gotten out.

After World War II, and mainly because of excellent reporting from London during the Blitz, the BBC developed a reputation worldwide as trustworthy in getting it right. In much of the world, that reputation still stands. But in Britain, the BBC is reviled for being left-leaning and woke-thinking.

The once great news service, United Press International, had a reputation among editors for being unreliable. I never found anyone who could prove that it was less dependable than its competitors, the Associated Press, Reuters and the English version of Agence France-Presse, but the myth was oft-repeated and stuck.

Similarly, The New York Times is regarded worldwide as exemplifying the gold standard for reliability. However, in the United States, many regard it as left-leaning and, therefore, less believable.

That doesn’t mean there are no mistakes, indeed egregious errors; we all make them and suffer the shame that goes with it. The agony of getting facts wrong is real and profound and known to every journalist.

Factual inaccuracy is a self-inflicted wound on a publication. If one fact is wrong, the veracity of the entire outlet is called into question in the reader’s mind.

Ownership is not as important as the integrity of the individual operation. The Wall Street Journal is regarded as being accurate, but the New York Post is thought of as having dubious accuracy, and Fox News is seen as incontrovertibly political, yet all three have the same ownership.

In the news business, fact-checking has to be part of the process. It can’t be glommed on after the event.

Journalism and its army of reporters can only help with facts in some measure.

When it comes to the industrial-scale disinformation pouring out of governments and political parties everywhere — and especially now out of Russia and China — technology needs to be mobilized to fight the technology-generated lies: fake images, sounds and news situations.

The best hope is that technology will be able to fight its own evil; to be able to tag the fake or at least to identify the real with watermarks — where the information came from and how it was created.

The world needs a fact-checking ethic, something that has existed quietly in journalism for a long time but which is threatened to be overwhelmed in the asymmetry where journalism is a small part of the dishonesty spewing out of social media, such as Facebook, X and Truth Social, and from Russia and other mischief-bent regimes.

Meanwhile Diogenes’ cynicism may be the first line of defense, along with the journalism of old. Verify before you trust.

Harassment in Egypt, Then and Now

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A recent front-page story in The New York Times about harassment and sexual assaults on women in Egypt, which have increased over the past two years, reminds me of my own experience there more than three decades ago.

I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo in the late 1970s. From my arrival in Egypt to my departure, I can't remember a harassment-free day. Indeed, the harassment began on the day I landed at Cairo International Airport.

Arriving at the airport, bleary from a difficult overnight flight from London, I grabbed the only taxi at the outside stand. I spoke some Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and I asked the driver, Mohammed, to take me to the American University.

The sun had barely risen when I got into Mohammed's cab, but when he dropped me off at the university at closing time, I'd seen much of Cairo as well as the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Throughout the abduction Mohammed would try to steer the car with his left hand, while trying to grope one of my legs with his right hand – a driving feat, considering I had pinned myself against the right backseat door.

Mohammed wasn't just running up the meter, he wanted to marry me. In fact, we stopped briefly at his uncle's souvenir shop and perfume palace near the pyramids and Mohammed told him that we were getting engaged.

“May God grant a successful conclusion [to the engagement],” his uncle said, handing me a small green glass vial of eye kohl through the cab window.

God, in his mercy, concluded this unwanted tour around 5 p.m. But Mohammed stalked me for another week, showing up at the university and at the apartment on the Nile River island of Zamalek, which I shared with two roommates. They had a head start on harassment management, and I seem to remember that they told Mohammed to hit the road.

The city bus we rode to the university was a daily opportunity for groping by Egyptian men. One morning, I remember getting on the bus which was overloaded with workers — especially men in drab pants and v-necked sweaters, mostly bureaucrats who worked in government administrative offices around Tahrir Square. I was clutching my textbooks and pocketbook, and trying to keep my balance.

As the bus sped along 26th of July Avenue, I heard a woman behind me say sharply to a man in his twenties who was standing close behind me, “You are very wicked.” I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had parted my wraparound skirt and had unzipped his pants. Caught almost in the act, he smiled that smile I came to abhor; the smile that said, “Don't blame me. You're a woman out in public and a khawaga [a foreigner, a loose woman].”

My roommates and I became inured to bad behavior by the boys (shabbab), who crawled under the seats in darkened movie theaters and grabbed our ankles, flashed us in street alleys in Alexandria, encircled us like sharks when we went swimming in the Mediterranean, and muttered ishta (cream) when we walked by them. We chalked it up to their sexual frustration due to the lack of socialization between the sexes, especially among the lower classes, starting at puberty.

“A dog's tail never stands straight,” says an Egyptian proverb about incorrigible habits, including the harassment and abuse of women by men.

In President Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which was opening to the West and modernizing, I was often harassed physically and verbally by men, but I never once feared for my life. Fear of Sadat's police and mukhabarat – the intelligence agents, who my roommates and I called the “green meanies” after the color of their uniforms — prevented men from public attacks on women, which are now so frequent and violent in the Arab Spring Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi.

Sexual assault of the kind that CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and many Egyptian women have suffered since the Jan. 25, 2010 revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak, are the result of the general security breakdown. But they are also the result of a breakdown of human respect and decency, which is a growing worldwide phenomenon.

Innovation and modernization, including the empowerment of women and girls, is suspect and shattering for many men in Egypt, so they beat a dusty retreat into traditional mores. A substantial presence of women in public life in Egypt, and elsewhere in the world, might get the dog's tail to stand straight.