President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress was well executed and widely reported as such by networks and journalists who have been both his most vocal critics and the targets of his hostility. But while that interpretation, which was accompanied by terms like “presidential,” was oft repeated, it also feels incomplete.
Tasked with analyzing the President’s speech, many pundits either failed to ask real questions about the contents of his sparkling remarks or they simply gave too much credit to the presentation (which, as Wednesday night’s Daily Show reminded us all, was the kind of act that Trump bragged about being able to pull off on the campaign trail). This happened to such an extent that even people within the White House were reportedly surprised by the praise.
Some sources in WH are frankly surprised at how pundits are warming to the speech. Say Trump has not changed, no big shift in policy coming.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) March 1, 2017
By the way, this isn’t the start of a drawn out declaration that it’s the media’s job to be hypercritical of President Trump at all turns. It’s just a collection of words laid down in service to the idea that context and facts matter, especially in the afterglow of a high-profile address to Congress, Americans, and the rest of the world. Especially in those immediate moments when people are still trying to process what they just witnessed.
We need to be reminded that we should rely on more than our emotions when assessing the gut-wrenching moment when President Trump expressed his condolences to Carryn Owens, whose husband, U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William (Ryan) Owens, died in a controversial raid in Yemen on January 29.
CNN pundit Van Jones said that, in that moment, Donald Trump became president and a “unifying” force. And President Trump’s actions were impactful and respectful. Of course, Carryn Ryan deserves gratitude and apologies for the sacrifice that she and her family have and will continue to endure. She deserves that applause from our leaders, but as her father-in-law said over the weekend, she (and the rest of the family) are also owed an investigation into what really happened.
The Owens family deserves accountability and we deserve a reminder that President Trump said that his generals were to blame in an interview on Tuesday morning. We also deserve a reminder that while the president was touting the mission as one that yielded results in his speech, there have been reports that say the opposite and indications that the mission was a complete failure that led to civilian casualties. We need to hear those charges so we can decide whether what we witnessed on Tuesday night was presidential grace or exploitative political theater.
The same thing goes for President Trump’s calls for unity and bi-partisanship in his address. Despite his frequent assurances that he didn’t divide the country, it would be hard for anyone to deny that he has done little to heal it. Maybe last night was a move in the right direction. But the rancorous tweets and the sore winner shtick on Twitter and in public remarks by him and his surrogates need to be presented as factual evidence of what he has done when judging the viability of what he says he wants to do.
Though it’s early, Donald Trump already has a presidential track record that legitimately colors many people’s assessment of his agenda. When he talks about immigration, women’s health, and clean water, we can’t forget the colossal misstep that was his Muslim travel ban, the cold implementation of his ICE sweeps (that don’t seem like they’ve been limited to rounding up “the bad ones”), aggressive moves against women’s health interests, and a rollback on environmental protections.
And pundits and journalists shouldn’t let us forget those things. And they shouldn’t let rosier presentations of those policies pass without being questioned. And when they do, we need to ponder the possible reasons why. One possibility is that journalists and left-leaning pundits don’t have an aching desire to quarrel or see the worst in people. Despite the assumed hatred, the media has, at many points, pulled Donald Trump back from the brink by lavishing him with praise after his convention speech and his second debate performance. Similar to the response he received following his joint address, Trump’s past dalliances with chaos helped to lower the bar, allowing pundits and other observers to be impressed by merely adequate and standard issue political performance art.
The cynical view is to say that the media likes to prop Trump up so they can continue to draw numbers and strength from his presence on the national stage. The less cynical view is that maybe they’re not nearly as biased as some believe, and they’re genuinely rooting for (and willing to report on) the best result in any instance while cognizant of the fact that most observers will put way more stock in the performance than in what is being said.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
Another possibility is that Trump’s constant assault on CNN and others in the media that he has labeled as “fake news,” is making an impact. Not, you know, on the business side because many are soaring in the era of Trump as a member of the so-called “Opposition Party,” but perhaps there are some that are worried about their reputation and their ability to convince a broad audience that what they say about President Trump is coming from someone who hasn’t always slammed him. Or maybe they just don’t want to be kept out of briefings or denied access, so they’re trying to accentuate the positive.
Regardless, the absence of analysis that includes those other elements from Tuesday’s speech on the same level as the praise for the packaging of the speech stands as a dereliction of duties on the part of pundits and journalists.
As Trevor Noah told Uproxx last week, “Facts are always your friend,” and an emotional or biased response to the president (no matter who he or she is) is not.
We’ve heard a lot of people wax poetic about the value of the press in the moments after a sitting U.S. president declared that some members of the free press were an enemy of the people (and then did it again). A lot of it has been spot on, but the clearest definition of what they (and we) need to be is vigilant advocates for ample information and champions of context. What are we all seeing, why are we seeing it, and what does this say about what we’ve already seen? Those are the questions that need to be asked every day.
It’s a simple task and many fell short of that responsibility following Tuesday’s speech. And that’s a disservice to all who were watching, and it’s something that sends a message to this president and his advisors that nothing matters more than the packaging.