The media’s long infatuation with everything Trump may have finally come to a screeching halt. His most recent “press conference” was such a cynical display of self-promotion even by Trump’s standards of excess that the media may have recognized their complicity in the airing of his every vulgar thought without consequence or rebuttal. Like a battered spouse, they may finally tossed their hands in the air and said “enough.” Trump gathered his sycophantic choir, otherwise known as the press corps, supposedly to make some really huuuuge announcement on the “birther” issue. Perhaps he would reveal evidence that President Obama was secretly a Muslim born in Kenya? No, with the words “President Barack Obama was born in the United States period,” he attempted to disavow his past racism regarding the legitimacy of our first African-American president.
Of course, this being a Trump speech his announcement was sandwiched between lies. He alleged that Hillary Clinton started the “birther controversy” and that he simply finished it when actually he courted birther rumors for years alongside other even more outlandish conspiracy theories. For example, Trump alleged that the Hawaii state official who verified the president’s birth certificate and later died in a plane crash was killed to protect a secret plot involving the president, as he implied in a tweet at the time.
But it was what preceded his announcement that may have made the fawning press corps realize they were being had. Before Trump spoke, the press was subject to a series of decorated military veterans espousing Trump’s magnificence and steely-eyed determination. The spectacle was a nearly hour long campaign infomercial. Trump’s 67 word announcement about birtherism was preceded by a far longer soliloquy on the grandeur of Trump’s new hotel where rooms go for just under $900 a night. The camera crews were then given a tour of the hotel sans reporters who were not allowed to attend and at least one who tried was physically restrained. Too many pesky, inconvenient questions. This sideshow may have been the watershed moment when reporters realized they were not intended to be just mere publicists or, at least, should be no longer.
The major networks retaliated by not using footage of the hotel tour since the nominee barred reporters. The venting of the journalist’s frustration was largely confined to the safe space of social media, but other journalists joined the chorus of condemnation. “We got played again,” CNN’s John King said on the air. Jake Tapper and Gloria Borger denounced the way Trump had manipulated the media as well. The New York Times published a headline saying: “Trump clung to the "Birther" Lie for Years, and Still Isn't Apologetic.” Another New York Times article called Trump's birther crusade a "smear." Finally, according to the Washington Post, Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief who is now the director of the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, said: “I’ve never seen anything as crass and disingenuous.”
But “crass” is Trump’s middle name, alongside commercialism and egotism. Surely, for a man who shows no interest in policy he is expert at manipulating the media using his campaign mostly as a backdrop to advertise his commercial endeavors and enrich himself. After all, which is of more importance - the level-headed leadership of America in troubled times or the promotion of all things Trump? The media talks insistently about a Trump pivot from a campaign of simply hurling insults to an immersion into issues when what is needed is a media pivot. The false equivalencies and mushy “balance” may finally be abandoned for an insistence on accuracy and truthfulness. After all, when a candidate demonstrates he is simply a con man who is in it for profit and self-promotion alone, then simply say so.
Given their fatigue at being used as a backdrop, the media may finally have found a new sense of urgency and quit normalizing the campaign of someone so unprepared and temperamentally unsuited for high office. In other words, they may finally do their job.