Scoops by Sam McAlister

Author:Sam McAlister [McAlister, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861544417
Publisher: OneWorld
Published: 2022-06-06T05:00:00+00:00

8

The Trump Years – Fake News and Impartiality Woes: Comey, Spicer and Daniels

US President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 and everything changed. Personal politics aside, his time in office was an absolute boon for news, for journalism and for us at Newsnight. His sheer unpredictability left seasoned journalists hanging on his every tweet – we found out about hirings and firings in random missives in the middle of the night. We established what his next policies would be via social media and we waited for the next scandal, blunder or disaster with bated breath. Viewing figures for news programmes soared, people were confused and gripped. It fell to programmes like ours to try to make sense of it all. We were expected to guide people in the new world order. His chaos gave us a chance to provide stability and cool-headed analysis in unprecedented ways. We could establish no pattern to his behaviour. All of the usual apparatus was gone. It was discombobulating and, in news terms, exhilarating.

President Trump considered the press his enemy. Almost all of us, bar a few favourites at Fox News, were considered impediments to his brand and mission. The administration coined some, frankly, inspired phrases to diminish the power of the press. Where there had once been the truth or lies, we now had new areas of understanding – ‘alternate facts’ as Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager and presidential counsellor, phrased it. And the battle between his staff and the press corps in Washington created unforgettable headlines daily. On the one side a President who saw himself as beyond scrutiny, and on the other side, a group of journalists befuddled by his behaviour and trying to hold to account someone who refused to play ball.

‘Fake news’ was the most brilliant, simple, and deadly, weapon in Trump’s arsenal. It created a new dynamic; not one where conversations could be had in good faith, not one where journalists would test and challenge power and policy, not one where it was assumed that debate was a basic tool of freedom of the press and democracy. Instead, we were liars, peddlers of propaganda. The battle was between the truth and the President, but he framed it as an ideological battle of his patriotism against the destructive machinations of a press that he painted as unwilling to give him fair coverage. The media, so he stated, was inherently ‘anti-Trump’ and, by implication, against the American people.

He called out journalists and outlets as ‘fake news’ almost daily. And it became incredibly difficult to deconstruct. At first, it was a strange idea, but very quickly it took hold. So challenging to the old rules about public discourse and to journalism as we knew it.

While America adjusted to its new leader, we were waiting for ours. Now that Ian Katz had left, the process of finding a new Editor had begun. Recruitment in the BBC is, in my experience, completely opaque. You’re told nothing. You know nothing. All around you, you have to read countless columns in the Guardian or The Times, speculating about who is next in line.

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