Kalb Report: Dealing with the Trump reality show

Is Trump good for ratings while being bad for journalism?

Nearly two years into the Trump administration, journalists are still struggling to determine how to cover this president who has broken all of the rules of communicating with the people and who is fighting to undercut the legitimacy of any news organization that dares to criticize him.

Joining Marvin Kalb at the National Press Club for Monday night’s edition of “The Kalb Report,” legendary ABC anchor Ted Koppel and three media reporters, Brian Stelter of CNN, David Folkenflik of NPR and WBUR, and Emily Rooney of WGBH Television in Boston, scrapped over whether the news media should just do its job or whether it has to fight back against a president who is undercutting the First Amendment.

“CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump,” Koppel said.

Shot back Stelter, “I reject the premise that these networks are making so much money off of Trump and thus would benefit from it.”

Video of the program is available online and linked to the right.

Trump’s attacks against the press “are a poison, and he’s infecting tens of millions of people with that poison,” Stelter said. “For us to sit here and pretend as if he is not saying it just lets it fester and further divide the country.”

Koppel said he had known Trump for 20 years before he was elected. On the day Trump got the nomination, Koppel said he interviewed him.

“In the course of that interview, he said to me, ‘You know, Ted, I don’t need you guys any more … I can contact my people directly.” That was because he had millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook that has only expanded during his administration.

“So, you have two things,” Koppel said. “A president who really understands how to circumvent the media as a means of activating his base. And the base, which in turn, is capable of communicating with one another in a fashion they’ve never been able to before.”

By focusing so much on Trump’s rhetoric, journalists are overlooking the real substance of what is happening, Folkenflik said. Trump has manufactured a crisis with all of his Tweets, he said, but what has really happened? The nation isn’t at war. The economy is perking along.

“We tie it all up in what his sentences are, how he addresses us,” Folkenflik said. “But often it distracts us from what’s actually happening throughout the government that’s affecting tens of millions of Americans.”

Emily Rooney said that while Trump has energized newsrooms and helped ratings, he has so taken over the news that news organizations ponder whether “we are going to have a Trump-free Friday.”

“Have people had enough of it?” she asked. “Shall we move on to how they covered the tsunami or how they covered Hurricane Joaquin?”

The problem the news media has is that its job is to report what the president says and whether it is true, Stelter said. “If we say Trump said five things that are bogus today, and that is true. But it sounds like we are attacking him.”

Added Rooney, “Incivility has been sanctioned by our president. He does it all day long.”

But Koppel said the news media has been engendering this revolution against it.

“I think we need a little humility about the people who are so frustrated with us that they find themselves turning in desperation to Donald Trump, if for no other reasons that he pisses us off and people love that. Just love it.”

And when Trump finally leaves the presidency, is that the end of all this?

Folkenflik said people already are planning for what happens when he leaves, no matter how he leaves. “What reality show does he get? ‘The Ex-Presidents of Bedminster, N.J.?’ The post-presidency will be televised.”

Launching its 25th season with this series, The Kalb Report is a joint project of the Club’s Journalism Institute, University of Maryland University College, the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs, Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, the Gaylord College of Journalism at the University of Oklahoma, and the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. It is underwritten by a grant from Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.