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Stephen H. Provost is an author of paranormal adventures and historical non-fiction. “Memortality” is his debut novel on Pace Press, set for release Feb. 1, 2017.
An editor and columnist with more than 30 years of experience as a journalist, he has written on subjects as diverse as history, religion, politics and language and has served as an editor for fiction and non-fiction projects. His book “Fresno Growing Up,” a history of Fresno, California, during the postwar years, is available on Craven Street Books. His next non-fiction work, “Highway 99: The History of California’s Main Street,” is scheduled for release in June.
For the past two years, the editor has served as managing editor for an award-winning weekly, The Cambrian, and is also a columnist for The Tribune in San Luis Obispo.
He lives on the California coast with his wife, stepson and cats Tyrion Fluffybutt and Allie Twinkletail.
Ruminations and provocations.
Filtering by Tag: CNN
“Breaking news” has helped create distrust and apathy on the part of the public. No one cares about the next turn of the wheel in a court case, because it will be appealed to a higher court anyway. … Another study about global warming? Who cares? We’ve heard that before, right? Another frantic newscaster chagrined and overwrought at Trump’s latest misdeed? What else is new?
Read MoreIn a desperate attempt to retain their audience, newspapers and broadcast networks changed their mission. Instead of simply reporting the facts, they started interviewing spin doctors on both sides of the political fence. In short, they replaced devotion to the truth with a quest for balance as their prime directive.
Read More“(Labeling everything as “Breaking News” is) kind of like going to a restaurant that advertises freshly baked bread, but only bakes it once a week — because that’s how often a new shipment of dough arrives — and simply reheats it for unsuspecting customers who walk in.”
Read MoreSince the book came out, a few more clichés have entered the mainstream — and become embedded there like the shell of a popcorn kernel that digs in underneath your gums and refused to be dislodged by Waterpik, toothpick or fingernail. Perhaps the most ubiquitous of these is a single two-letter word that it seems like half the people interviewed on cable news channels. It’s the “y’know” of 2020, except it’s worse because you can’t avoid it by tuning the speaker out halfway through the first sentence. It’s the first thing out of their mouths.
Read MoreIt’s no wonder Donald Trump chose Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz to represent him at his impeachment trial.
These men are two peas in a pod. Trump personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, is more of an attack dog in the Trump mold, but beyond that surface similarity, Trump and Dershowitz have far more in common, and it runs to the core of who both men are.
It turns out, Trump and Dershowitz have quite a lot in common. Consider the following:
They both trample on the truth. Trump has done so more than 15,000 times since taking office, according to The Washington Post. And Dershowitz? Consider this gem: “The courtroom oath — to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth — is applicable only to witnesses... because the American justice system is built on a foundation of not telling the whole entire truth.” When Dershowitz said this, he basically admitting he has no obligation to tell the whole truth. Which pretty much shoots his credibility. Of course, lawyers and politicians are both notorious for spinning the facts to benefit their own interests. In a list of 15 professions in a 2018 Gallup poll ranked lawyers 12th and members of Congress 15th (politicians) sandwiched around business executives and car dealers. But that’s just the beginning of the common ground between Trump and Dershowitz.
They don’t care what the experts think. Trump thinks he knows more about war than four-star generals and doesn’t believe climate change is a problem, even though nearly every scientist says it is. Dershowitz, meanwhile, disagrees with the overwhelming majority of legal scholars who say impeachment does not require a statutory crime. His response, when confronted with this fact? “Most of the scholars disagree with me. I think they’re wrong.”
They hate admitting mistakes. Or apologizing. Trump hardly ever does (the rare exception being his televised apology for disgusting remarks made on an Access Hollywood tape). When confronted about his own record, Dershowitz tries to dance around the subject like, well, a lawyer. In 1998, he argued that abuse of trust was impeachable; in 2020, he said it wasn’t. When Anderson Cooper asked him if he’d been wrong before, he answered, “No, I wasn’t wrong.” He would say he was “much more correct right now.” People averse to admitting mistakes have one thing in common: egos. The big kind. The fragile kind.
They love the spotlight. Most presidents do, to be sure. But most presidents don’t put their names on hotels. And while we’re at it, can you name another chief executive who has used $60,000 donated for charity to buy a portrait of himself? Dershowitz’s actions speak louder than his words. He’s drawn to cable news broadcasts like the Mothman to a disaster waiting to happen. Like Trump, a former reality TV host, Dershowitz loves those cameras. And he also loves those high-profile clients that ensure he stays in the headlines: O.J. Simpson. Jim Bakker. Michael Milken. Jeffrey Epstein. ’Nuff said.
They associate with shady characters. In Trump’s case, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Rick Gates... In the case of Dershowitz, see the list directly above (which actually makes Trump’s bunch seem tame by comparison). These were, of course, not personal friends, but clients. Still, lawyers such as Dershowitz don’t have to take such cases. Why choose clients like these? Why not let the public defender do it? Because... see above: Ego. Spotlight.
They defy common sense. Trump uses a mix of intimidation, media marketing and hot-button topics like immigration, religious issues and gun rights. Dershowitz does it through legal arguments that make no sense. According to Dershowitz, a mixed motive is not corrupt. But that’s what “corrupt” means! If you put arsenic in a glass of milk, you’ve corrupted it. The milk is still there, but the whole mixture is toxic because you’ve added the poison. Put it another way: Dershowitz and the president’s legal team argued that a president can’t be impeached if he has a mixed motive. So, if someone steals a car because his mom needs a ride to the supermarket... that must be OK.
They shatter norms. Trump’s all about doing things his way: traditional standards be damned. (This is ironic when you think about it, since the Constitution is the ultimate traditional standard in American secular life.) Trump pulls out of treaties, sends unappointed cronies to foreign countries to dig up bullshit on political opponents, and governs by Twitter. You get the idea. Dershowitz, meanwhile, suggests that it’s impossible to impeach a president who does something underhanded to get elected. Why? Because the president thinks his election is in the public interest! And if he thinks so, it must be true, right?
They love to fight. And not just fight, but fight for extreme positions. As Laurence Tribe, another Harvard legal mind, said of Dershowitz: “He revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.” Sound like someone else you know? Former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told Politico: “If he’s not in a fight, he looks for one. He can’t stop.” And the more outrageous Trump’s position, the more people will criticize him, and the more he can...
They play the victim. Trump is the all-time champ in this department, with his absurd claim that “no politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly” than he has. By playing the victim, he gains sympathy from his followers, and suggests any attack on him is an attack on them, too. It’s been an effective strategy. And Dershowitz? When Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin dared to challenge his “great and unmatched wisdom” (oops, sorry, that’s Trump’s phrase, not Dershowitz’s) on CNN, he accused them of being “two bullies.” Or maybe they were doing their job.
They claim to be something they’re not. Trump, a billionaire, the champion of the common man? This is a guy who spent $25 million to settle a lawsuit alleging he’d defrauded students who signed up for his non-accredited Trump University. A guy who violated the National Labor Relations Act by refusing to bargain with union workers at his Las Vegas hotel. I could go on. Trump the champion of churches? Yes, Trump belonged to a church New York City church in the mid-2000s, but the pastor didn’t see him there once in five years. Dershowitz, for his part, calls himself “a Hillary Clinton liberal Democrat.” Yet he’s called gun-control advocates “foolish liberals” and used a nonsensical argument to immunize presidents from oversight. Unchecked power is seldom, if ever, any friend of liberalism. I doubt anyone would have called King George’s lawyers liberals if they’d sued the rebellions colonies for breach of contract.
Thinking out loud ... or at my keyboard.
Postulated: Modern mainstream journalism is heavily biased in favor of Donald Trump, at least when it comes to the Mueller investigation. You read that right. The same journalists Trump accuses of being out to get him, the ones he calls purveyors of “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” are biased in his favor.
Journalists are funny creatures. I know. I used to be one. They obsess about being “fair and balanced” (a phrase that long predates its appropriation by Fox News as an Orwellian battle cry). They’ve been known to give equal time, or at least a mention, to such folks as anti-Obama “birthers” and climate change deniers.
These claims may be no more factual than those of flat-earthers and Holocaust deniers, but they’re given a voice because enough of them are shouting loudly enough to demand it. Not for the sake of facts, but for the sake of “balance.”
If enough people believe something false, does that alone make it worthy of coverage? Some in the media seem to think so. But it’s hard to cover a belief without lending it a degree of legitimacy, and that’s what journalists do when they repeat false claims. They’re worried that if they don’t, they might be accused of favoritism – especially when it comes to politics – so, they let virtually anyone with a loud enough voice have a platform.
That generally means people with R’s and D’s after their names. Independent voters are too, well, independent to offer any unified message, and third parties are too small.
All other things being equal (or close to it), the level of interest in a story should be a factor in whether it sees the light of day. When it becomes the overriding factor, however, there’s a problem. The Founding Fathers understood this when they devised a system founded on a statement of fundamental principles: the U.S. Constitution. Under this system, any movement that opposed those principles was deemed unlawful – regardless of how popular it was.
Similarly, the journalist’s unwritten constitution should put the truth ahead of popularity. Period. No matter how great the sacrifice in terms of ratings or subscriptions or advertising dollars.
When journalists decide popularity is more important than truth in deciding whether to report a story, they abandon their traditional role as gatekeeper. They throw open those invisible gates they’re supposed to be guarding to anyone and everyone, including marauders who want to destroy or plunder or conquer.
The result is chaos, and it’s hard to put the genie back into the bottle.
Journalists are gatekeepers whether they like it or not. They have limited resources - space on their news pages, time on their newscasts, staff to report the news - so they must pick and choose what they cover. Some things will get covered and others won't. Journalists are the ones who decide; they're responsible.
When they abdicate this responsibility, giving con artists and conspiracy theorists a platform, they may try to debunk them – thereby compromising their own integrity. Suddenly, they’re not just reporting a story, they’re commenting on it. Are Anderson Cooper or Sean Hannity reporters or advocates ... or entertainers? Even Hannity doesn’t seem to know: He’s argued at various times that he is and is not a journalist. If he doesn’t know the difference, how are viewers supposed to?
And how are journalists supposed to retain credibility when they seem more like attack dogs than reporters? In the eyes of viewers, they’ve sacrificed the very “balance” they sought to achieve in the first place.
More important, though, is that it’s a lot harder to confront marauding hordes inside the city gates than beyond them. The only negotiations likely to take place at that point will involve the terms of your surrender.
Before I go further, I should point out a key distinction: Sometimes, the actions of people purveying falsehoods are worthy of coverage, even though their ideas aren’t. When 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in an attempt to somehow rendezvous with an imaginary spaceship, the tragedy was newsworthy. The spaceship wasn’t. These people believed so strongly in its existence that they were willing to die for it, but no one suggested that this viewpoint deserved to be considered as a rational possibility for the sake of “balanced coverage.”
Yet somehow, when politics become involved, all that changes. Modern politics transforms many in the media from champions of truth into scared puppies cowering under the table.
They tend to believe they must give the ideas of both sides relatively equal weight, even when one side is arguing for beliefs that have been disproved by science, rewrite history or fly in the face of the most basic common sense.
It’s bad enough if one side is telling the truth on a given issue, while the other side is lying. (In politics, neither side tells the truth all or even most of the time). But what if one side is making a series of false statements, and the other side isn’t saying anything at all?
This is exactly what’s happening in the Mueller investigation. Donald Trump and his legal team/PR machine are spewing out daily tweets, legal claims and proclamations, many of which are at odds with established facts and with one another. Sometimes, both.
Mainstream news outlets aren’t just covering them, they’re falling all over themselves to do so. They trot out a parade of “breaking news” items, significant and otherwise. Then, when there’s a lull, they call in any number of talking heads who proceed to analyze this stuff to death, exhume its remains and dissect it until there’s nothing left but dust and bones.
All the while, they’re referring back to the Trump team’s version of events, time and again. No matter how fanciful or self-contradictory that version may be, it will start to take hold if it’s repeated often enough. And it appears to have done just that: In July, 45 percent of those surveyed in a Washington Post poll disapproved of the way Mueller was handling the investigation, up from 31 percent at the start of the year.
This, in spite of the fact that, apart from several indictments, no one really knows what Mueller is doing. They only know what the Trump team tells them: that the inquiry is a “witch hunt” being conducted by a bunch of “angry Democrats” and that it’s “bad for the country.” All of this is either badly exaggerated or patently false. Even so, it’s dutifully reported in painstaking detail by Trump’s mouthpiece: the mainstream media he professes to hate.
Mueller, meanwhile, remains silent because that’s what a good prosecutor does.
The result is far worse even than what happens when media outlets give equal coverage to two sides – one factual and the other not. In this case, not only are journalists reporting falsehoods and dubious statements from a biased source, those statements are the only things they’re reporting. Because that source is the only one they’ve got. Trump’s team is the only side with direct involvement that’s providing any information, so their message, naturally, carries the day.
The media “solution” to this only makes matters worse. Cable news networks trot out talking heads to act as surrogates for what Mueller might be doing or considering. But it’s all just speculation, and speculation is no substitute for facts. Viewers know this and treat it as such.
When commentators try to balance the scales by casting themselves in adversarial roles, it’s even worse. It only fuels Trump’s narrative that the media are biased against him, even though almost all the news of substance they’re reporting originates in his own camp! He’s having his cake and eating it, too, all the while giving journalists heartburn.
This leads me to the blunt conclusion journalists don’t want to face, and the thesis of this column: In order to achieve actual balance in this case, the media would have to stop reporting the Trump team’s side.
Should they, really? The news media are supposed to report the news, not withhold it. But if they’re so dedicated to achieving “balance” that they repeat phony claims such as birtherism and climate change denial, shouldn’t they refrain from covering one side when the other side doesn’t have a voice?
Especially when the side that’s talking has a history of contradictory, false and self-serving statements. And especially when national security is at stake. Let’s not forget the gravity of the accusations being made: that people close to or involved in the Trump campaign were complicit with wealthy, politically motivated Russians in helping to influence the outcome of a national election.
Our election, not theirs. Not an election to be decided at the pleasure of Vladimir Putin, who has openly admitted he wanted Trump to win. If he’d wanted Hillary Clinton to win, the episode would have been just as repugnant. No more, no less. Putin’s actions are an insult and an act of violence against the heart of a democratic republic, against the Constitution, against the nation and against each of us as U.S. citizens.
Journalists must take their role as gatekeeper seriously if they are to avoid being suckered into becoming a propaganda mouthpiece for Donald J. Trump. That’s where they’re headed, if they aren’t already there.
But as much as many in the media may loathe Trump personally, there’s a reason they won’t pull themselves back from the brink. They might tell you it has to do with journalistic ethics or integrity, but there’s something else in play here: ratings, subscriptions and revenues.
Bottom line: Trump’s story sells newspapers and lifts ratings, which, in turn, woos advertisers. This is ultimately why mainstream media outlets will go right on telling it. Right on serving as his mouthpiece. Because to them, popularity really is more important than truth.
Popularity equals ratings equals profit. Trump and the media both know this. They’re on the same page, so is it really any surprise that media companies do Trump’s bidding? When it comes right down to it, it’s all about the Benjamins.
Stephen H. Provost is an author, former journalist, historian and media critic. His book Media Meltdown in the Age of Trump examines the toxic relationship between journalism and Donald Trump, focusing on the media’s transformation from impartial observer to ringside commentator and sometimes-combatant in the 21st century culture wars.
