Peter Copeland

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Love It Or Hate It, the Trump Show Must Go On . . . and On . . . and On (Book Review)

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Book Review

 

Front Row at the Trump Show

by Jonathan Karl

Buy the Book on Amazon

Front Row at the Trump Show, the new book by Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, warns that the press corps risks becoming the “opposition party” instead of an unbiased source of news.

Of all the reporters who cover Donald Trump at the White House, few have known him longer than Jonathan Karl, who was a 26-year-old reporter for the New York Post when he met the flamboyant real estate developer.

The story that day in 1994 was not about politics, it was about Michael Jackson, who was on his honeymoon in Trump Tower. Trump himself gave Karl the grand tour of the building, agreeing to share details if Karl attributed everything to a “source in the Trump Organization.”

Years later, a somewhat bemused Karl was sitting with Trump, who was on the phone and lying his head off about something not at all important. It was then that Karl realized, “Donald Trump lies for comic effect, he lies to make himself feel good, he lies to make you feel good, he lies because he likes to, he lies because he can.”

It probably won’t surprise people that the chief White House correspondent for ABC News says that Trump lies, but Karl does not think Trump alone should be blamed for the toxic state of relations between the Trump administration and the news media.

“It may be silly for somebody who goes to work in the Oval Office every day to feel insufficiently appreciated, but the truth is that the mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is relentlessly and exhaustively negative,” Karl writes in his new book Front Row at the Trump Show. “His accomplishments – and there are accomplishments – are either ignored or overshadowed by the drumbeat of outrage fueled by his own outrageous behavior.”

Karl writes, “…all too often reporters and news organizations have aided and abetted the effort to undermine the free press by openly displaying how much they detest this president – his policies, his blatant disregard for the truth, or his vilification of the press – and behaving like anti-Trump partisans rather than journalists striving for fairness and objectivity. We are not the opposition party, but that is the way some of us have acted, doing as much to undermine the credibility of the free press as the president’s taunts.”

One reporter Karl singles out is Jim Acosta, the CNN White House reporter known for his combative exchanges with Trump. During one presidential briefing, Acosta shouted over another reporter to get a reaction from Trump. “Acosta was portraying himself as some kind of righteous advocate for the free press,” Karl writes, “but to most of the reporters in that room, he was just rudely interrupting a colleague . . . ”

The current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Karl has strong feelings about the White House press secretaries – he’s worked with 13 different press secretaries under four presidents, so far – especially when they lie deliberately. Karl actually has less patience with them than he does with presidents who lie, because he believes the job of a press secretary is to tell the truth.

Nor does he spare the self-proclaimed “grownups” who have joined Trump’s inner circle supposedly to protect the country from the president’s impetuousness. Karl’s method of criticizing is not to give his own opinion, but to quote directly from people like John F. Kelly, Trump’s short-term chief of staff, in a way that makes Kelly come off like a self-important, and ultimately impotent, jerk.

One Trump official who was vilified in the press, Kirstjen Nielsen, is portrayed sympathetically by Karl as misunderstood and a victim of cutthroat White House politics, when she unfairly became the face of Trump’s immigration policies. The policies were not hers, but as secretary of Homeland Security she tried to carry out the president’s wishes, and was sharply criticized before she resigned.

Karl points out that Trump’s attacks on the news media have a calculated purpose. Trump himself has said that by attacking reporters, he casts doubt on everything they say. Perhaps more importantly, the Trump Show needs a villain to spar with the hero, and reporters happily play the role. Trump has effectively, and unfortunately, branded the news media as the “opposition party.”

“But a free press is not the opposition party,” Karl writes. “Our role is to inform the public, seek the truth, ask tough questions, and attempt to hold those in power accountable by shining a spotlight on what they are doing. We are not the opposition, but in the Trump era, the free press has sometimes appeared like the opposition.”

There is a place for opinion journalism, Karl writes. “But there is a crucial role for reporters and news organizations who strive for objectivity and balance. Our opinions – and we all have opinions – should be irrelevant.”

One of Karl’s interesting observations is that reaction to violent protests led by racists in Charlottesville was a turning point for Trump. In one of Trump’s comments about the 2017 violence, the new president clumsily tried to blame “both sides.” When even his Republican allies attacked him for equating racism with anti-racism, Trump reversed himself. But then that change of tone was criticized, too.

All his life, Trump believed he never should back down or admit a mistake, but on the unanimous recommendation of his advisors, he tried to change course about Charlottesville, sort of, and it backfired. Karl writes that Trump vowed never again to correct himself or apologize.

Reporters at the White House should remember that about Trump. Reporters frequently ask Trump – about every perceived error, misstatement, falsehood, or errant Tweet – if he will admit to making a mistake or apologize. No, he won’t, and the insistent reporters appear to be badgering and shaming him. There must be more effective ways to hold the president accountable, without expecting Trump to go against his nature and admit a mistake.

“The Trump show will eventually become a distant memory,” Karl concludes. “The question is whether America will ever be the same again, whether we have become a nation of people who define truth in relative terms, accepting as true only what we want to believe, yelling ‘fake news’ at everything else, a nation so thoroughly divided we cannot agree on what is real.”

Fortunately, we have people like Jonathan Karl – reporters with good memories, even dispositions, and a relentless desire to be in the front row.

Peter Copeland is a former foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief who occasionally occupied the Scripps Howard seat in the White House briefing room. He is the author of Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter.

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It’s All Journalism Podcast: Zigging with all the zags of a career in journalism

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Podcast about journalism career paths, mentoring, how to prepare to cover dangerous conflicts overseas, and other topics with “the broccoli of media-focused podcasts.” Michael O’Connell is an excellent interviewer (i.e. good listener) who teaches podcasting. Check him out on Twitter @bossoftalking and at his website: It’s All Journalism.

 

406. Zigging with all the zags of a career in journalism

Recent Posts

Podcast: Quality Journalism, Like Great Leadership, is Built on Honesty and Character

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mccain

I was honored to do this interview with the McCain Institute, named for the late war hero, senator and presidential candidate, John McCain. The institute “advances character-driven leadership based on security, economic opportunity, freedom and human dignity.”

Check out the McCain Institute here.

I covered John McCain when he was a new senator and I was a new Washington reporter. He was without pretense, easy to talk with, and always free with his opinions. Reporters loved him because he was deeply plugged into military affairs (and later other issues) and was never shy about sharing his knowledge.

The host of the podcast “In the Arena” is the smart and fun Luke Knittig, the senior director of communications at the McCain Institute. A combat veteran, Luke served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and as the military spokesman for international forces in Afghanistan.

Luke and I talked about my book, Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter, about journalism ethics, and challenges for people starting a career in news today.

Note: The interview was recorded prior to the Coronavirus pandemic.

 

Listen to the Interview here.

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Book Review: One Violent Day in May Defined the Era of Protests Against the Vietnam War. A Fine New Book Shows How Kent State Was Covered by a Brave and Determined Newspaper, With Lessons for Journalism Today

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Book Review

 

When the Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later

by Robert Giles

Buy the Book on Amazon

The words “Kent State” mean only one thing to many Americans who were adults during the Vietnam War: the place where National Guard soldiers opened fire and killed four student protesters.

The killing of the four students and the wounding of nine others on May 4, 1970 at a rural Ohio campus occurred amid anti-war protests around the country. It was a time when young people were angry with their parents, the government, the universities, and the news media. Older people were baffled and outraged by the protests, which seemed anti-American, the work of “outside agitators,” or the folly of an indulged and spoiled generation.

The divide was not just young versus old, but also liberals versus conservatives, hippies versus squares, business versus labor, men versus women, and blacks versus whites.

An important difference from today was that the news media appeared – to people on the outside – to be free of those social conflicts. What we now call the “mainstream media” was the only news media. There was no internet, Twitter, Facebook, or 24-hour cable news channels catering to the left or right. The national news media organizations were less dominant, and most people got their news from very competitive local television stations and especially local newspapers.

Society’s tensions existed inside those newsrooms, of course, which mostly were run by older white men who had lived through the depression and World War II. They were defenders of the establishment, but they believed they had a vital mission to inform the country accurately and fairly, even when bad things happened.

The Akron Beacon Journal was the local newspaper 20 minutes from Kent State University, and the sometimes violent protests on campus – called rioting by the headline writers – were covered regularly. The weekend before the shooting, students had burned down the campus ROTC building and fought with firefighters trying to put out the blaze. The paper that landed on doorsteps that Sunday was a fat 271 pages, with 28 pages of classified ads, and a circulation of 174,000.

The young man in charge of the newsroom was the managing editor, Robert Giles. His boss was traveling in Israel with local business leaders, and Giles was left in control. He would lead the paper’s coverage of the shootings, the long investigations that followed, and the court cases that lasted for years. The paper’s coverage won a Pulitzer Prize and is a model of how to cover breaking news and the difficult search for truth, meaning, and justice.

The insightful and very readable story of how the paper covered Kent State is told in a new book by Giles called When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later. The book is focused on that one day in May, but really it is the product of the author’s lifelong career as a distinguished journalist and an example of how a single story can illustrate the core values of real news.

The book’s focus is on the reporters, photographers, and editors at the paper. Although the author was at the center of the coverage, he keeps himself in the background, writing the book the way he directed the coverage that day: firmly and competently in control, but without calling attention to himself. The few times Giles reveals his feelings are to take the blame for some mistake or to regret that reporters didn’t get the credit they deserved.

The paper’s work was not necessarily appreciated at the time by its readers. The editors received hundreds of letters, most of them angry and accusing the paper of taking sides in favor of the students and against the National Guard and the governor.

“There were two prominent and distinct views,” Giles writes. “Our commitment to be fair and balanced, and to give voice to the truth, came face to face with special interests: President Nixon, the governor of Ohio, university officials, National Guard officers, student radicals and angry townsfolk.”

The book concludes by imagining how a story like this would be covered today, at a time when print newspapers are in decline and the internet allows anyone to capture and share information.

Today the Akron paper, like most local papers, has a small fraction of the staff it had in 1970, and it no longer has a virtual monopoly on news coverage (or advertising) in the area. That solid, reliable institutional voice is missed.

On the other hand, many people witnessing a violent clash today would record the protest on their phones, possibly avoiding some of the confusion and uncertainty – even 50 years later – about what happened at Kent State, such as who started shooting and why.

Today “experts” would appear on cable news within minutes claiming that the shooting was the fault of Democrats or Republicans, or that the supposed video was enhanced or fake or out of context. People on social media would make up details about the shooting, and share speculation and conspiracy theories. Readers might throw up their hands and say it’s all too confusing, and anyway you can’t really know the truth.

When Truth Mattered is a powerful argument for trying to get the facts right, even when there is chaos, violence, and confusion, and even when people dispute the facts and disagree about their significance. The paper didn’t get everything right the first time, and editors kept sending the reporters out to correct the record or explore new angles. The book shows how quality journalism was done 50 years ago, and holds up a high but achievable standard for how it should be done today.

 

Peter Copeland, a former foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief, is the author of Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter.

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Podcast: Journalism is changing, but values are not

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I love this interview about journalism values with Maria Carrillo and Lane DeGregory, two journalists who have done it all better than most. Maria brings a wise editor’s perspective (and a beautiful speaking voice for podcasts), and Lane is a caring, empathetic writer who gets people to talk, which is why she’s won a Pulitzer Prize and two (so far) Ernie Pyle Awards for feature writing. Lane and I get choked up during the interview, a couple of softies who have covered hard things.

‪Listen on Stitcher or Apple Podcasts.

Many Things Changed During Four Decades of Journalism, But Not the Main Thing

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Forty years ago this week, on a cold day in Chicago, I ran toward a roaring, deadly fire that tore through an apartment building, covering my first big news story and starting a journalism career that would take me around the world.

As a 22-year-old just out of college, I was overwhelmed by the heat of the crackling fire, the bitter smell of smoke, and the screams of little children when they were dropped from the burning building’s upper floors into the waiting arms of rescuers on the snowy ground.

An experienced colleague from the office coached me over the phone about the information I needed from the fire, and how to get it. My first question as a professional reporter – it makes me cringe to remember – was to a weathered, older firefighter I thought was the chief, but who turned out to be the chaplain.

With help from patient editors, I eventually put together the basic facts, even interviewing a young house painter who had caught a baby dropped from a high window. A few hours later, I heard the story – my story – come across the air from an all-news radio station, and I was thrilled. I knew then that journalism was my calling.

In my new book, Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter, I show how it felt to cover wars, coups, earthquakes, elections, and revolutions from 30 countries, and how I came to run the Washington bureau of a venerable news company. Forty years and thousands of stories after that first fire in Chicago, much has changed about covering the news, except for the most important thing.

Obviously, the technology has changed from manual typewriters, pay phones and printed newspapers. The speed and volume of news have increased beyond what seemed possible when I started in 1980. It was during my lifetime that the TV networks shocked everybody when they doubled the length of the nightly national news—from a mere fifteen minutes a day to thirty minutes. Few imagined TV news around the clock, or entire networks presenting current events, or that a “public service” like news would be so profitable.

The tone of television news changed, too, from traditional broadcasters playing it straight to more “personality” and then outright opinion, partisanship, and shouting matches.

The reporters covering the news changed, too. Enrollment at journalism schools flipped from mostly male students to mostly female. A few (but not enough) women, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans became leaders in mostly white, male, straight newsrooms. The modest demographic changes were part of a healthy redefinition of which stories should be covered, how they could be told, and who should tell them.

Then the internet blew up everything. The power of a few people (including me) to set the news agenda was shattered. The old editors no longer could decide who was a journalist, what was a story, or what was fair commentary. Politicians and businesses could speak directly to news consumers without going through journalists as gatekeepers. Citizens could talk back to the media and to each other. Enabled and emboldened by anonymity online, the tone of political discourse grew more vicious.

The information network was always “on,” meaning there was no more news cycle with deadlines and built-in pauses, just round-the-clock, unfiltered information. The faster pace and increased competition reduced the time to check facts and frame stories, and the news of the moment could be triggered by a random, ten-second video from somebody’s cell phone.

More information did not always mean more wisdom. My generation was taught not to believe everything we read. My children had to be skeptical of unlimited sources of information. Even photos and videos—once the definition of unfiltered truth—could be misleading or lies.

It was as if a tornado had hit the Library of Congress, knocking the covers off books and scattering the pages. There was more stuff but less sense.

An unintended consequence of the new technologies was the collapse of the business model that supported traditional news organizations, especially local newspapers. The loss of revenue threatens newspapers and local television stations and all but the largest online news organizations.

Behind all of these changes, however, the journalism mission has not changed. The basic challenge still is to make sense of reality and to share that reality with others. Getting the facts right and telling the stories quickly, accurately, and fairly, remain the goals. Journalism has never been that complicated; it’s just difficult to do well.

News consumers do not think we are doing the job well enough, however, and complaints about bias are a product of declining trust. Reporters never have been especially popular, and even when I started, polls on trustworthiness ranked us below doctors, police officers, and other professionals. The distrust has grown, and today’s readers have more ways of voicing their complaints. While we consider ourselves part of the solution to the nation’s problems, many readers and viewers see us as part of the problem.

To earn trust, our driving principles should be the same as when I started: speed, accuracy, and fairness. Journalists must be fast because competition makes us better. Accuracy is the minimal requirement for real news. But even if we are fast and accurate, only fairness will earn the long-term confidence of the people who count on us.

There was no golden age of news in the past, however. In many ways, journalism is more professional than ever. When American newspapers were young, they were filled with lies, rumors, fake news, and political manipulation.

It is true that when I started, reporters knew more than they put in the paper, and today people are quick to publish or share more than they really know. Again, this is about values—fairness and accuracy—and not about the internet or the nature of social media. Technology is not to blame when we cheat on our values, but it can be an enabler.

We know the right values—speed, accuracy, and fairness—and we know the difference between real news and fake news. Rapidly improving technology allows us to report and distribute real news instantly from anywhere to everyone. Journalists need to embrace the newest technologies, recommit to our highest values, and develop business models that will pay for quality news coverage.

If we play it right, the combination of new digital tools and universal connectivity—powered by old-school news values—could make this the beginning of a real golden age of journalism.

(Peter Copeland was a foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the E.W. Scripps Company. He is the author of five books, including Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter, from which this column is adapted.)