At least the ongoing battle between President Trump and what he derisively calls the “fake news” media is entertaining.
The media may not like the barbs Trump hurls, but there is no denying he is good for their business. Newspaper subscriptions and TV viewership of news-related programming has increased since Trump took office. Add in Trump’s propensity to create scandal or drama and today’s media has a very compelling product.
Trump dislikes a lot of what Washington reporters — aided by an impressive stream of government leaks — write or broadcast. So you can only imagine his glee when CNN, for whom he reserves some of his angriest attacks, allowed an inaccurate story onto its website last week.
The story said incorrectly that a Senate committee was investigating a meeting between the head of a Russian investment fund and a Trump associate that occurred shortly before the president took office.
On Monday, the CNN reporter who wrote the story resigned, as did a manager in the network’s Washington bureau and the leader of its investigations unit. CNN had taken the story off its website within a day, saying it didn’t meet its editorial standards. One source said the story got on the website without going through proper procedures for editing and fairness.
CNN also apologized to the Trump associate, Anthony Scaramucci, who was mentioned in the story. He in turn said the network “did the right thing. Classy move. Apology accepted. Everyone makes mistakes. Moving on.”
Naturally, Trump and his White House staff were having none of that. Trump used Twitter to boast that CNN got caught cold making up something, and his spokesman referred reporters to an online recording of a CNN producer, secretly recorded in an elevator, saying that the network has no smoking gun to prove wrongdoing by Trump in his contacts with Russian officials.
CNN’s people goofed. You can imagine how it happened. The story was one more piece of information linking the president’s transition team to a Russian oligarch, and somebody rushed it onto the website before allowing enough editors to question the content. (The story never made it onto CNN’s broadcasts.)
Every reporter and news organization makes mistakes. The only way to handle them is to correct the error and apologize for getting it wrong. To its credit, CNN did that.
Trump, on the other hand — and there’s no nice way to say this — has a history of saying untruthful or inaccurate things, but he never bothers to apologize for it. Long ago one of his writers coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole” for his exaggerations.
It’s a free country, and Trump can say pretty much anything he wants without having to apologize for it. But he and his people sometimes go so far with the hyperbole that it’s hard to avoid laughing.
Here’s the latest example: The Washington Post reported Tuesday that at least four Trump golf clubs have given “fake news” a new definition. A March 1, 2009, Time magazine cover of Trump is displayed in the clubs, with the only problems being that Time never had a magazine with that date, and Trump was not on a Time cover at any time that year.
Assuming that Time is part of the fake news conspiracy Trump’s team always complains about, why would he or his staff want to brag about being featured on its cover? And why would someone as well-known and successful as Trump was in 2009 even bother to create fake magazine covers?
We know why: The president loves flattering publicity, even if it’s fake news. So it’s hard to take him seriously when he criticizes errors like the one CNN made.
