Daniel W. Drezner: The mainstream media has not covered Trump like Michael Wolff. Thank God for that.
Regardless of what you think about Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” the book has made a whole lot of news. Despite the president’s best legal efforts, the book has shot to No. 1 on Amazon’s sales ranking. It has lead to a pretty severe rupture between Donald Trump and former White House strategic adviser/current Breitbart head Steve Bannon. And it has led the president to tweet about what a very stable genius he is.
Why is Trump so desperate to say he’s smart? Why did his surrogates fan out on Sunday to say the president is sane and rational? Wolff’s book can be distilled down to what he said on NBC late last week: “The one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child. And what they mean by that is he has a need for immediate gratification. It’s all about him. . . . He just has to be satisfied in the moment.” Even Trump knows that this is not a presidential look.
This renewed focus on Trump’s ability to be the president has led some to bemoan why the rest of the mainstream media can’t be more like Wolff. GQ’s Drew Magary made this exact argument over the weekend:
“Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump and his minions the same way they’ve exploited the cluelessness of others. And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.
“Everyone around Donald Trump is too polite to Donald Trump. Democrats, foreign dignitaries, underlings … all of them. And the White House press is perhaps the worst offender. From the media pool playing along with Sarah Sanders during press conference — conferences where Sanders openly lies and … on democracy — to access merchants like Maggie Haberman doling out Trump gossip like so many bread crumbs, too many reporters have been far too deferential to an administration that is brazenly racist, dysfunctional, and corrupt. And for what purpose? It’s clear to me that Haberman and the like aren’t saving up their chits for just the exact right time to bring this administration down. No, the only end goal of their access is continued access, to preserve it indefinitely so that the copy spigot never gets shut off. They are abiding by traditional wink-wink understandings that have long existed between the government and the press covering it.”
I’m not a journalist, but as a professor and a columnist, I have had to read a lot of journalism about Trump over the past year. And I can only conclude that Magary is correct when he says that the mainstream media hasn’t covered Trump the way Wolff did. And thank God for that. Because the more you think about it, the more insane Magary’s argument seems.
The problems with Wolff’s book are manifest. I mean, this is how Wolff describes his methods at the start:
“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
“Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
You know what journalists tend to do? They tend to publish only things that they believe to be true because that also have, you know, corroborating facts to back it up. When there are conflicting accounts of an event, journalists tend to be explicit about that in their reportage. I am not saying journalists have gotten everything right or distributed their coverage of this administration efficiently. They haven’t. But they do tend to cop to their mistakes and care about rectifying them.
Still, let’s say, as many White House reporters do, that Wolff’s book should be taken seriously but not literally. The larger thesis that Trump is unfit to be the commander-in-chief is a point well taken. Surely, the mainstream media should have questioned Trump’s fitness for office in the past year, right?
To which I must ask Magary and like-minded critics: What the hell have you people been reading for the last year?!
This story was originally published January 9, 2018 at 3:59 AM with the headline "Daniel W. Drezner: The mainstream media has not covered Trump like Michael Wolff. Thank God for that.."