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Solidarity? In America? Among the media? It seems astonishing that anything quite so unified could grow from America’s famously polarised soil, but here we are, watching as such sworn enemies as Fox News and MS NOW stand in solidarity with each other, and against President Donald Trump’s latest attack on their craft.
These are the paradigm cases of American media partisanship: Fox News often Trump’s cheer squad, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) a kind of progressive riposte. Each symbolises everything the other hates. And yet this week, that was forgotten when Trump declared he was banning MS NOW, alongside CNN and Politico, from the White House, and deactivated their correspondents’ press passes. Illegally so, it turned out, and a court has just ordered they be reinstated. But in the meantime, Fox – alongside ABC, CBS and NBC – had boycotted Trump’s press conferences.
Suddenly, Trump found himself at risk of greatly reduced television coverage in a week of addressing the UN and hosting Xi Jinping. Already, we’ve seen his team forced to capture their own footage of Trump arriving heroically to open the new White House helipad, the kind of thing that news cameras would have filmed. The feed was nigh unwatchable. There he was, saying words no one could hear, exuding exactly no authority. A Trump-shaped tree, falling in the forest.
That sort of thing is unimaginable for someone like Trump, who loves and dominates television more than any president ever has. He is famously fixed to Fox News. He appoints its anchors to high office. In his first term, Trump staffers tried giving him briefings in the form of television packages because it was the best way to ensure he would pay attention. He amassed some US$4.6 billion ($6.5 billion) worth of free television coverage in the 2016 election campaign alone, about twice that of Hillary Clinton. He has effectively lived with a television camera on him since. A boycott of this kind hits Trump somewhere near where it hurts.
I’ll admit to being surprised by these developments. After all, Trump has berated the media for his whole premiership without provoking any solidaristic response. You’re familiar with the catchphrases: “the fake news media”, “the enemy of the people”, “corrupt” and “dishonest”. He has attacked individual journalists as “human scum” and “low-life reporters” and told one to be “quiet, piggy”. He has even banned individual reporters from the Pentagon and White House, most notably CNN’s Jim Acosta in 2018. And nothing.
The difference this time was that he just went ahead and banned whole outlets. That has two consequences. First, it ends up costing the other outlets much more money because they often share footage, which allows them to operate with fewer resources. Cut two TV networks from the pool and you leave a big shortfall for the others to make up. But second, Trump did so explicitly because their “cumulative stories” led him to regard them as unfavourable. And whatever you think of those outlets, or even of the media in general, that’s an enormous move.
To effectively demand favourable coverage in exchange for access is to undo the very concept of accountability. Trump’s answer to this charge hits all the typically populist notes, but it also had a slip within it: “I don’t have to let them into my … into the people’s house.” Trump seems to regard access as his to give personally. Then he corrects, and asserts it on behalf of the people.
By now, some of this should sound familiar to the Australian ear. The pitch isn’t so heightened because Pauline Hanson is not prime minister. But she has taken the step of banning entire outlets from attending some of her press conferences. In this case, it’s the ABC (for whom I am a radio host) and The Guardian, and on the Victorian hustings, occasionally, The Age. The reasoning is also colourfully similar. “I answer to the people, not the media,” declared Hanson in her National Press Club address in June.
Party director James Ashby said giving the ABC access would be like “going back to some domestic violence relationship” (Hanson’s views on such violence as a “two-way street” presumably don’t extend this far). The ban is patchy and Barnaby Joyce certainly seems exempt from it. But One Nation has pulled candidates from ABC slots where they were regulars until they joined the party. In short, Hanson has crossed a line the US media has decided not to accept.
Might Australian journalists do the same? Could we see, for example, the Murdoch press – broadcast and print – stand on principle and say that if the ABC cannot attend a press conference, then they won’t either? I admit, it’s hard to imagine given the way the Murdoch media talks about the ABC, but is it any harder to imagine than it would have been for Fox News?
So far in Australia, we’ve seen quiet disapproval from the outlets that aren’t banned, but nothing planting a flag on the ground of principle. We’ve seen the odd commentator say One Nation’s move is a bad political strategy because it becomes a controversy that distracts from the party’s message. For what it’s worth, I think this profoundly misreads the extent to which the strategy only heightens One Nation’s message. But so far, the tone is that it’s something a bit silly. Not a violation of anything serious. The idea of media solidarity, based not on a liking for each other but a belief in the concept of journalism, doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone.
Perhaps that would change if Hanson became prime minister. But by then, the principle at stake may have long since eroded. Trump and Hanson’s wars against the media work precisely because they tap into a rich vein of anti-media sentiment.
In any conventional age, a politician complaining about the media would look petulant and self-obsessed. Today, their devotees lap up this sort of thing, like it strikes a blow for the common man against the elites. If media organisations want to let that slide, they can. But they should be careful it doesn’t slide away completely.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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