Media Madness Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Howard Kurtz

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

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  e-book ISBN 978-1-62157-756-0

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  To Abby, an amazing writer, and Laurie, an amazing talker;

  To Judy, an incredible journalist, and Bonnie, an inspiring teacher

  CONTENTS

  1A Catastrophic Media Failure

  2Trump Works the Refs

  3Trump Trauma

  4A Question of Loyalty

  5A Leaky Ship of State

  6The Dossier Surfaces

  7Spicer Goes to War

  8Bannon as Darth Vader

  9Kellyanne Under Siege

  10Trump Targets Media “Enemies”

  11The War over Wiretapping

  12“The Knives Are Out”

  13Answering with Airstrikes

  14White House Game of Thrones

  15Jared and Ivanka Fight Back

  16The Comey Firestorm

  17The Media Go to DEFCON 1

  18Collusion Confusion

  19Climate Change Calamity

  20The Mueller Escalation

  21Investigative Overreach

  22The Secret Russia Meeting

  23The Mooch’s Moment

  24Charlottesville Catastrophe

  25Tackling the Sports World

  26The Fight over “Fake News”

  27The Era of Harassment

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  This is a book based on original reporting. Most of the interviews were conducted on a not-for-attribution basis to achieve the most candid and accurate account possible of Donald Trump’s election and presidency. In describing scenes and conversations where I was not present, I have spoken with one or more people with first-hand knowledge of what happened.

  I’ve drawn on a wide array of reporting and commentary from newspapers, magazines, networks, websites, and social media, and have credited them as frequently as possible in these chapters. My thanks to those in the political and media worlds who generously shared their time to help me tell the story of one of the most challenging periods in American history.

  CHAPTER 1

  A CATASTROPHIC MEDIA FAILURE

  Two days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Kellyanne Conway dived into a media maelstrom with an appearance on Meet the Press.

  It did not go well.

  She and Meet the Press host Chuck Todd had a history. NBC’s goateed political junkie had texted her after four a.m. on Election Night, congratulating her on what he called the greatest upset in the history of American politics. Conway said she was “euphoric.”

  But their relationship took a bad turn when she taped a Meet the Press interview in late November.

  When she got home that Sunday morning and told her husband George that it had gone smoothly, he said, “What do you mean? You weren’t on for even a minute.”

  Conway called Todd and asked what happened. The anchor—who had booked Conway under pressure from the Trump team—realized there had been a miscommunication. He explained that he had told a staffer the show was packed and the most they could do was run sound bites.

  “I don’t give sound bites. I don’t speak in sound bites,” she said.

  Todd asked how he could make amends.

  “It’s only 8 a.m. on the West Coast,” Conway said. “You can run the whole interview. You’ve done 8 minutes with Ash Carter,” Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, “and I’m falling asleep.” Conway was steamed. NBC News President Deborah Turness called to mend fences, but Conway did not respond.

  Now Kellyanne was doing a live interview with Todd from the North Lawn of the White House. Todd demanded to know why Trump press secretary Sean Spicer had made a “ridiculous” statement that was “a provable falsehood” about Trump’s inaugural crowd being bigger than Obama’s. Things turned personal when Todd laughed at Conway’s explanation that Spicer was providing “alternative facts.”

  “Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president,” Conway said. “You’re supposed to be a news person. You’re not an opinion columnist.”

  Conway was disgusted and knew her pushback against Todd would not get replayed on any network. Conway was sympathetic toward journalists, but here she was, trying to talk about Trump’s policy agenda, and getting ripped by a guy she had known for two decades. She thought it was “symbolic” of “the way we’re treated by the press.”

  Todd regretted letting his emotions show, but not the substance of his questions. He thought Kellyanne had simply run out of talking points, and was laughing at the absurdity of the situation. The fact that it was a satellite interview, lacking the conversational cues provided by a face-to-face sit-down, made his interruptions look overly confrontational.

  The president called Conway to congratulate her on her performance against Todd. His vice president, Mike Pence, later joked to her: “Does Chuck Todd have any teeth left?”

  But the unfortunate phrase “alternative facts” stuck to her like tarpaper. She had meant equally accurate explanations, like “two plus two equals four” and “three plus one equals four,” but it quickly became journalistic shorthand for White House exaggerations and falsehoods. One viewer, however, liked the phrase.

  “In a way, that was genius,” Trump told Conway.

  “And in another way…?” she asked.

  The president was too busy sympathizing. “They do that to me all the time, take one word,” he said.

  Two days later, Chuck Todd texted her with an offer: “Would love to chat when you have time. I also think we should do a face to face sit down on cam. Maybe something more extended for my cable show sometime next week. Just a thought. All about reminding folks we both prefer cordial back n forths.”

  Kellyanne happened to be meeting with the president. She asked him how to respond.

  “Tell him I thought you were treated with great disrespect,” Trump said.

  Conway tapped the words into her iPhone: “President Trump said you treated me with great disrespect.”

  Todd quickly replied: “I respectfully disagree. Of course, I’ve taken a lot more disrespect than most reporters and never make it public. I’m sorry this was your response.”

  Kellyanne texted, “That was his response. I typed what he said.”

  “Well. Let me know what YOU think of my pitch.”

  Conway put the phone down. She was done with Todd.

  She eventually relented, and Turness, the NBC news chief, came to see her and Hope Hicks, the president’s loyal young assistant. Conway did not hide her disdain for how NBC and MSNBC were treating the administration.

  “This is a side of me you never see,” she said. “I’m usually kind and gracious. Your networks are a hot mess.”

 
Turness said that MSNBC was the province of its president, Phil Griffin.

  “No, it’s your stepchild,” Conway said.

  “And you’ve got SNL,” Hicks added, the comedy show on which Alec Baldwin was brutally mimicking Trump.

  Turness delivered an overall apology. NBC wanted to continue a fifty-year tradition of spending a day trailing each new president with a camera crew. Fat chance, Conway thought, if this is how we’re going to be covered.

  “I let you guys into the White House and this is what happens,” she said.

  Donald Trump is staking his presidency, as he did his election, on nothing less than destroying the credibility of the news media; and the media are determined to do the same to him. This is not just a feud or a fight or a battle. It is scorched-earth warfare in which only one side can achieve victory.

  To a stunning degree, the press is falling into the president’s trap. The country’s top news organizations have targeted Trump with an unprecedented barrage of negative stories, with some no longer making much attempt to hide their contempt. Some stories are legitimate, some are not, and others are generated by the president’s own falsehoods and exaggerations. But the mainstream media, subconsciously at first, have lurched into the opposition camp, are appealing to an anti-Trump base of viewers and readers, failing to grasp how deeply they are distrusted by a wide swath of the country.

  These are not easy words for me to write. I am a lifelong journalist with ink in my veins. And for all my criticism of the media’s errors and excesses, I have always believed in the mission of aggressive reporting and holding politicians accountable.

  But the past two years have radicalized me. I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness out of a conviction that they must save the country from Trump.

  I first got to know Donald Trump three decades ago and never made the blunder of underestimating him during the campaign. I saw all his weaknesses—the bluster, the bullying, the refusal to admit mistakes—but I also saw strengths that most of my colleagues missed, especially an ability to channel the anger of millions of voters who despise the press—including the old-guard conservative press—and other elite institutions.

  This was part of an all-out culture war that stretched well beyond journalistic operations to late-night comics, musicians, Hollywood celebrities, and Broadway actors, all of whom ripped and ridiculed Trump at every opportunity. From Alec Baldwin to Meryl Streep, from Stephen Colbert to Seth Meyers, they depicted the president as being beyond the pale, an aspiring dictator, feeding Trump’s sense of being under siege and prompting him to lash out at those across the media-and-entertainment complex.

  This is, at bottom, a battle over the truth. Who owns it, who controls it, who can sell their version to a polarized public that increasingly cannot agree on basic facts.

  Everything you read, hear, and see about Trump’s veracity is filtered through a mainstream media prism that reflects a lying president—and virtually never considers the press’s own baggage and biases.

  Everything you read, hear, and see from the Trump team is premised on the view that media news is fake news, that journalists are too prejudiced, angry, and ideological to fairly report on the president. Trump and his acolytes use these attacks on the Fourth Estate to neutralize their own untruths, evasions, and exaggerations.

  Organized journalism is built around rules, traditions, and the careful parsing of words. Traditional politics is built around polling, spinning, and the careful deployment of words, which are often drained of meaning to avoid giving offense. While the two sides are nominally adversaries, they are also joined in a mutually dependent relationship. They speak the same language. They know they will be penalized for reckless rhetoric, for statements that can be proven wrong.

  Trump doesn’t believe in any of that. He is loose with his language. He makes little attempt to vet his presidential pronouncements. He watches cable news endlessly and sometimes regurgitates half-baked comments. And the media’s truth squadders punch themselves silly but rarely seem to land a blow.

  What many journalists fail to grasp is that Trump’s supporters love his street talk and view the media critiques as nonsense driven by negativity. They don’t care if he makes mistakes. As paradoxical as it sounds, negative coverage helps Trump because it bonds him to people who also feel disrespected by the denizens of the mainstream press. The media take everything literally, and Trump pitches his arguments at a gut level. It is asymmetrical warfare.

  My greatest fear is that organized journalism has badly lost its way in the Trump era and may never fully recover. Even if the Trump presidency crashes and burns—in which case the press will claim vindication—the scars of distrust might never heal.

  My view doesn’t reflect some evolution or epiphany on my part. I haven’t really changed. My profession keeps moving the goalposts.

  When Trump first declared his candidacy, I sat on endless television panels with prognosticators who said he was a joke, a sideshow, a summer fling, and then that he was going to implode the next week, the next month, that he wouldn’t make it to Iowa, that he had no shot at winning the nomination. They pronounced last rites each time he caused a media uproar with controversial comments. And then in the fall the cognoscenti knew that of course he could never win a general election, right up to the evening of November 8, 2016.

  When I would say that Trump wasn’t going to self-destruct, that he was media savvy, that he was connecting with alienated voters, that bad press only helped him, I was dismissed in some quarters as being in the tank for a bombastic billionaire. Or being a naïve soul who didn’t really understand politics. Or being a closet right-winger who somehow kept his disturbing views hidden all these years. Or a person who had imbibed the Kool-Aid at Fox.

  The truth is that I wasn’t pro-Trump at all, I was pro-reality.

  The point here is not that I was right, but that so many in the news business couldn’t see beyond their own biases. Or they would say Trump might win, but the prospect was so frightening that the media had to stop him by convincing voters he was a racist liar, and dammit, why aren’t they getting it?

  It turns out they were the ones who failed to recognize what was unfolding before their eyes. It was the most catastrophic media failure in a generation.

  CHAPTER 2

  TRUMP WORKS THE REFS

  The first time I met Donald Trump, he told me that if he ran for president, he would win.

  It was 1987.

  We were in his twenty-sixth-floor Trump Tower office, where he was promoting his book The Art of the Deal, and he had recently taken an exploratory trip to the first primary state. Which he was more than happy to discuss.

  “When I go up to New Hampshire—I’m not running for president, by the way—I got the best crowd, the best of everything in terms of reception,” Trump told me. “The politicians go up and get a moderate audience. I go up and they’re scalping tickets. You heard that? They’re scalping tickets. Why? Because people don’t want to be ripped off, and this country is being ripped off. I think if I ran, I’d win.”

  He sounded exactly the way he does now—brash, self-congratulatory, over the top, and utterly convinced that his wealth and success meant he could accomplish virtually anything.

  I didn’t exactly envision him in the White House, but he was great copy for a reporter based in New York, feuding with everyone from hotel queen Leona Helmsley (“a disgrace to humanity”) to the mayor Ed Koch (a “moron,” “jerk,” and “disaster”). Trump admitted he had a “thin skin” about negative press, which had to be one of history’s great understatements.

  The real estate magnate had strong views on world issues, complaining that the U.S. military was subsidizing Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, and that Japanese trade policy was taking America to the cleaners.

  His staff, even then, had decidedly mixed feelings about the man. Blanche Sprague, a top Trump lieutenant, told me that “to work for Dona
ld you absolutely have to love him, because he will absolutely drive you crazy. There are days when I could cheerfully bludgeon him to death.”

  I called Trump periodically and he always called right back—even in the first days of the tabloid frenzy over his divorce from Ivana, triggered by his relationship with Marla Maples.

  Trump was such a creature of the New York Post and Daily News that I somehow felt comfortable asking him why he had offered his estranged wife just $20 million of his $2-billion fortune. He called it “a very, very substantial amount of money,” backed by a prenup that was “sealed in gold.”

  And what about her argument that she had contributed to his tycoonery? “You know me pretty well,” he said, attributing a greater intimacy to our relationship than I had dared imagine. “Do you think anybody helped me build this fortune?”

  Trump always spit out the sound bites and signed off: “I gotta go, baby. You take care. I’ll read you tomorrow.”

  But our relations, such as they were, had the roller-coaster quality that would become so familiar. When he was building the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and I had to ask him about reports of cash-flow problems, he snapped: “I don’t know why I even talk to you. You’ve never written anything nice about me.” Which was demonstrably untrue, but didn’t stop him from taking my call. (His casinos later went into bankruptcy.)

  Two decades later, when I had long since decamped to Washington and we hadn’t spoken for some time, Trump was at the top of the polls for a possible presidential bid in 2012. I called his lawyer to ask about allegations by customers at several business ventures that they had been ripped off. To my surprise, Trump called back, going on about what a great writer I was and how he was delighted to talk to me.

  “What about the 50 deals that turned out great—are you going to cover that too?” he asked. Some of the allegations, Trump said, are “really bullshit stuff.”

  After flirting with the idea for decades, Trump was ready to take the plunge on June 16, 2015. Unlike most of my colleagues in the media, I knew instinctively when Trump came down that golden escalator to declare his candidacy that he would be a formidable candidate.