Kopin Tan of Barron’s raises a red flag about President-elect Donald Trump’s dismissive treatment of the media.
Given Trump’s distaste for answering questions from reporters—he hasn’t held a press conference since July and has favored addressing Americans directly through tweets and YouTube videos—one wonders what will become of this press room. Maybe it’ll make an amazing spa. Maybe the chairs can be cleared to make room for Zumba!
Trump isn’t obliged to hold press conferences, of course, and he won’t be the first president to have his preferred medium: Franklin D. Roosevelt liked radio addresses, and John F. Kennedy beamed his face into your living room through the television. But no recent president has been so openly derisive of the press.
Mario Cuomo once said that you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose, which Trump must have taken to heart when he called reporters “scum,” “lowlifes,” and then, for added emphasis, “the lowest form of life.” Already, Trump has accused the press of inciting protests. In a recent speech, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour cautioned that “first the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating—until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives.”
Living as he does in a Fifth Avenue tower decked out in gold, Trump calling the press “elitist” is a little like cheddar calling Gruyère cheesy. But in the coming years, it’ll be interesting, and important, to see how the Trump administration affects the way the press does its job, and whether Corporate America co-opts the media tactics of the billionaire-in-chief. After all, if there’s any place where the money and the incentive to lie are even bigger than in politics, it’s in the stock market.
Just think: Which CEO wouldn’t want to sidestep a conference call after a lousy quarter when he or she must field pesky questions from analysts and reporters? Why not just tweet the explanation for adopting a more-forgiving accounting rule? Denigrating the messenger to discredit the message also could prove useful when companies have bad news to unload. This doesn’t even count the cottage industries that have been spawned that Trump didn’t directly create. If fake-news Websites with an allegedly Russian sheen can persuade some Americans that, say, the pope had endorsed Donald, then these for-profit entrepreneurs might be mobilized whenever public opinion needs reshaping—such as when one needs to push a new hamburger patty or a hot tech stock.
Of course, if Tan proves prophetic, biased media outlets will have only themselves to blame.
