Donald Trump will almost certainly go down in U.S. history as the most dishonest president ever to occupy the Oval Office. The Washington Post has documented more than 18,000 lies or misleading statements made by the president since being sworn into office in January 2017.
But while the corporate media has been less reluctant to label Trump’s false statements as lies over the past three years, there have been a disturbing number of instances where the president’s blatant untruths have been given prominent coverage. One such incident occurred when Trump talked about a non-existent scandal that he called “Obamagate,” which was alluded to in a May 14 press conference, with no context, facts or evidence. The baseless charge was given prominent front page coverage in the New York Times, while the testimony of whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright, the ousted director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, who documented the Trump administration’s negligent response to the coronavirus pandemic, was relegated to the paper’s inside pages.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Mel Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and an adjunct professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins University with a previous 42-year government career at the CIA and State Department. Here, Goodman talks about his recent article titled, “How the New York Times Enhances Trump’s Propaganda” that conveys his concern about the flawed and dangerous media coverage of the Trump presidency.
MEL GOODMAN: Well, I thought there was a lesson learned in 2016 that the New York Times had to be very careful in how you cover Donald Trump. But I’m not saying it’s easy because when you have a president who’s really a reality TV star, he’s not a politician. He’s not a thinker. He’s not someone who reads and absorbs great amounts of material. And the job of a journalist is similar in some ways to my job when I was an intelligence analyst for 24 years, you know, how do you separate the noise from the signal? And the problem with Donald Trump is the noise is the signal. So recently what got me very concerned was the front page article above the fold by Peter Baker in the New York Times over the charge of Obamagate. There is no Obamagate. There’s nothing associated with Obamagate. There’s no crime you could come up with.
And eventually in the piece, Baker finally alluded to the fact that there were no specifics in these accusations. But on the front page, you had references to Obamagate, which was created out of whole cloth. And Baker gave the first part of the article to the charge and the support it would get from people like Lindsey Graham and others. These loyalists inside the Senate, Tom Cotton from Arkansas, would be another one. And eventually he got around to the lack of substantiation. But, some people only read the headlines on these pieces. Some people don’t delve that deeply into the article. the New York Times and the Washington Post and to a certain degree, the Wall Street Journal are the three main newspapers in the mainstream media. And when they pick up a story, other press services and newspapers around the country, which are rapidly vanishing, do find they have to follow that story.
You know, if the New York Times covered it, then they have to cover it. So when you have two newspapers that are supposed to be liberal and somewhat left of center, I still find when you look closely at the editorial writers in the Washington Post – people like Michael Gerson, David Ignatius, Fred Hiatt, and others, George Will would be another one – that they’re incredibly conservative. And the New York Times seems wedded to this concept of equivalence, which is really false equivalence. We saw this story in the Mueller investigation where they compared the Democratic charges to the Republican charges. Well, the Democratic charges were based on evidence based on testimony and the Republicans were coming up with a series of conspiratorial notions that were coming out of social media.
And given what Trump has done to the media, branding it fake news – and I know from when I could travel and did travel around the country to give talks, to give lectures, there’s a great deal of confusion out there about what is real news. There’s this tremendous cynicism in this country. And cynicism is a very corrosive element to begin with. When people tell me to explain why the Soviet Union collapsed, I start with cynicism. The fact that the Soviet people no longer believed their leaders. And I’m not saying it’s going to bring down the United States, but it’s [cynicism] certainly weakening the United States, if your leaders cannot be believed.
SCOTT HARRIS: What is the best approach in your view of how the media should report on Donald Trump when there’s so much misinformation and disinformation – lies? Is the answer, very aggressive fact-checking or something else?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, I think it’s a combination of things. I once asked a psychiatrist about dealing with a narcissist. We’re pretty sure that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist. And his advice he says that he gave to patients was, “If you’re involved with a narcissist, you want to get away from that narcissist as quickly as possible, as far as possible and as soon as possible.” We can’t do that because he is president of the United States, but we don’t have to hang our hat on every charge that he makes when we know he’s challenging the kind of reality that we live in. And it’s the kind of disinformation that’s totally corrosive to the political process. Don’t give it a lot of attention. It took a long time for the press to actually come around to use the word “lie” when talking about Donald Trump.
The Post has an interesting feature, but it is only a feature – and that’s “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler, whose book is coming out in a week or so, that deals with all the lies of Donald Trump. But I think they have to be very direct in doing that. But that goes back to what we talked about earlier. He is a reality TV star. He’s a real challenge for the press. He’s not easy to cover. It requires new rules of the road.
For more information, visit the Center for International Policy at internationalpolicy.org and Mel Goodman’s CIP website at internationalpolicy.org/
