In an election seemingly chock-full of paradigm shifts, one involving the press’s traditional role as “gatekeepers” of information bears special attention. Traditionally, politicians pass information to the citizenry through the press. Since both the politicians and the press are human beings, most of the disseminated information is carefully worded by the pols, then is curated, filtered and editorialized by the press. The editorializing, which a normal and nowadays naive person would expect to stay on opinion pages, happens more and more on the “news” pages. This is done in several ways, including selective reporting and selective omission, crafting of language in particular ways, article placement, picture selection, etc.
We might consider this editorializing justifiable to a degree because pols themselves spin their releases for maximum benefit, and because the press has a traditional role as government critic and watchdog. So, we have for decades witnessed a dance between the government’s information gatekeepers and the press, with each side working its moves to best accomplish its ends.
The press’s “management” of political news reached what some consider a breaking point in this past election. Some prominent news organizations decided that the stakes were too high for them to simply function in a traditional journalistic sense, so they started injecting more naked bias into their news pages in an effort to swing the election in Clinton’s favor. Here’s where things got interesting.
My first job was as an aerospace engineer for a defense contractor. I was one of several fresh-out-of-school kids hired into a particular group on a particular project. We learned our jobs as we went along, taught by a mix of not-as-young and significantly-older engineers. One of the standout memories I have (and one whose lessons were reinforced by lessons I learned in business school) involved one of the not-as-young engineers. Lets call him Mike.
Mike was the manager of a particular database that tracked the data modifications we computed. He held tight control, requiring that we submit all data inputs through an antiquated system that involved hand-written forms forwarded to a typist who made keypunch cards out of our inputs. It was clunky and time consuming, and every database update would take a couple days at least. As we learned our jobs better, we realized that there was no real reason we couldn’t make database mods individually and directly. Mike, who was also notorious for answering our questions without explaining the “why” (“I’m not a teacher” was one of his oft-repeated mantras), obviously resisted this change. He argued that multiple hands managing the database could mess the whole thing up, an overblown concern that was easily manageable with backups, but it was clear that he felt his control of this vital link was his job security. Our group supervisor, who wanted to elevate the group’s stature (and his own) by being nimble and responsive, ended up, after a good bit of discussion, siding with us, and Mike had the keys to the kingdom taken away. His warnings proved unfounded, and our productivity improved markedly. Mike (who was, oddly enough, a great guy to hang out with outside the workplace) was quite unhappy at being side-stepped, as one might expect.
The lesson of this anecdote was reinforced in one of my management classes, where we discussed how micromanaging and retaining control of gatekeeper tasks was actually counterproductive to success and career advancement. Mike, rather than teaching and delegating the database gatekeeper role (not a high-level, challenging job by any stretch of the imagination), clung to it in the false belief that it ensured his future. What happened instead is that his bottleneck led us to work around him and it, and workflow improved.
This is what’s happening with the Press and Trump. Past politicians, presidential candidates included, knew what they were dealing with in the press and employed their own army of writers, spinmeisters and flacks to find the best ways to get information through the bottleneck. Trump, helped immeasurably by the emergence of social media, realized that he didn’t have to work through the bottleneck. And, since he was not a politician, he had no blindered tunnel vision about “this is how it’s done” to deter him from talking directly to the electorate.
The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin discusses a recent example of this new way in his coverage of Trump’s thank you rally in Cincinnati, and he also observes that the Press isn’t particularly happy at the protocol-breaking detour. Indeed, many in the press are vocally sniffing at the loss of their gatekeeper role.
BBC World News America’s Katty Kay recently grumbled that “his supporters … don’t have much respect for the media.” CNN doyenne Christiane Amanpour laughably tries to assert that “the press is there just to report objectively” and speaks of her fear for journalism. Other left-leaning “journalists” report that, in some cases, they’re fearing for their personal safety, but even in doing so fail to acknowledge that their biased reporting is at the root of the enmity they allege. On the flip side, a pro-Trump reporter alleges that she was fired for expressing personal views on a private Facebook posting.
Pundits have correctly observed that Trump has been antagonistic to the Press since the get-go. What they miss is that Trump merely saw an opportunity and seized it. He recognized that a great big chunk of America felt that the press stood against them rather than as their front-line against the government, and he seized on those voters’ discontent. Whose fault is this? Trump’s? Or does the blame lie with a press corps that has gotten so full of itself, so convinced that its duty is to shape opinion and remold society into its preferred image, that it alienated a big chunk of the country? Even now, they talk of resisting a master manipulator rather than returning to their traditional role of news reporter and exposer of shenanigans. Certainly, the press should un-spin what politicians and their flacks have spun, but it’s expected that pols are self-serving, and people, even “fly-over rubes,” are not as stupid as the press wants to believe.
When too many rocks are dropped into a free-flowing channel of a stream, the stream reroutes rather than continuing to flow through the rocks. When someone attempts to route the stream in a way that conflicts with the natural geography, the stream eventually finds its natural path again. When someone standing between you and a job or a goal is perceived as an obstruction rather than as a value-added, you’re likely to seek a different path. When someone thinks he is greater than the stream, and seeks to control it contrary to the lay of the land, he may very well find himself standing alone on dry ground.
Trump’s presidency is a result, not an antecedent. It’s arguable that a more traditional politician might not have had his success, despite having fewer faults and down-sides than Trump, because the traditional politician might have sought to dance the aforementioned dance with the press rather than breaking the paradigm. Trump saw the lay of the land and found a way to work with it rather than conform to the unnatural construction the Press had a hand in creating. He realized he could speak directly to people that the Press had been ignoring or “managing,” and achieved a success that the Press is still shocked by.
If the Press wants to avoid fading further into irrelevance, it needs to take a big bite of humble pie, and accept that it must go with the flow instead of trying to reroute it beyond what it will tolerate. Will all these sniffly reporters do so? I doubt it.
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