Questions and Answers: How should journalists report on Donald Trump?

Donald Trump has been in the political spotlight for almost a decade and it has always been a challenge for the media to cover him.

The former president has called national media networks such as ABC News and CBS “fake news” organizations and spent large portions of his press conferences and rallies criticizing media coverage of him.

There was also “sanitized” coverage of him, with the media normalizing some of the wild and controversial things he said.

Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, joined Dimitri Sotis on WTOP on Thursday to discuss how the press should cover Trump.

Listen to the full interview below or read the transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, discussed how the press should cover Donald Trump with Dimitri Sotis on WTOP.

Dimitri Sotis: However, something tells me you're not going to tell us all to throw up our hands and stop trying. I wanted to look at a few different ways this has manifested itself recently. Everything unusual he said, from talking about an enemy within to talking about what the late golfer Arnold Palmer looked like while showering in the locker room with other pros, was covered. Maybe it's just because we're so close to November 5th. But not long ago, you could find an article somewhere that just talked about Donald Trump promoting school vouchers, completely ignoring 90 minutes of a rally where he said all sorts of unusual things.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yes. I mean, obviously the first decision you make as a news organization about a particular event is: Cover it? And then the question is how? You know, in 2015, when Trump was a candidate that people actually doubted would win the nomination, he got a lot of free coverage, which was pretty easy because he was discounted. You know, the press blessed him by covering him uncritically as a form of entertainment. Then, as you know, the question arises: once he is the party's candidate, as he is now, the question of whether you represent him is predetermined. You have to cover him. He is one election away from re-election.

So the question is: how do you cover it? And I think that as his own behavior has become increasingly erratic over the course of the election, the press has made a collective decision to cover him more closely. Don't avoid the thought of reinforcing the things he says. Instead, keep the camera rolling, make the audio clips longer, don't clean or filter him because people generally know what he's like, but you need to know how he's changed or if his behavior has become even more erratic or dramatic to see him fully.

Dimitri Sotis: Hindsight is 20/20, but shouldn't this have been put into effect a long time ago?

Tom Rosenstiel: Well, I mean, it's a more difficult calculation when he's running against several other people in a primary and he's not the candidate yet, because you have the calculation if you make the mistake that the press made in 2015, him to cover and cover If you appeal to him much more than any other candidate, you will give him oxygen. And it's essentially unfair to the other candidates who are less well-known and, you know, need some recognition for voters to evaluate them.

The kind of microscopic coverage we're seeing about Trump now would have been unfair to his opponents in the primaries a year ago, who had very little name recognition and needed to introduce themselves to give voters a sense of who they were were and who they were decide whether they want one of these candidates as an alternative to Trump. Once he is the candidate, the math becomes much simpler. But I think the kind of microscopic coverage we're seeing now would actually have been unfair to his advantage and unfair to his rivals' disadvantage during the primaries.

Dimitri Sotis: What do you think of this very term that has been popping up in the last few weeks? “Healthy washing” as they call it. This is exactly what we were just talking about: just grabbing a quick quote or quote doesn't give the full picture of what this candidate is about.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yes. I think that even though the term has caught on and is kind of an idea that's in the air, I don't think it's a real thing in some ways, and that the people who use the term “healthy washing” use, don't do this either They like Trump, and they want more people in the United States and more Americans to think that Trump is dangerous, unpredictable, unstable and basically crazy. The term “healthy washing” suggests that it is not healthy. They want the rest of the country to see it the way they see it, and they believe the press is the only way to do that. So, in some sense, out of frustration, they blame the press for the fact that 48% or 49% of the country approved of Trump in polls by various measures.

To them it's inexplicable and they think if only people would see him the way they did and that's the press's fault for not doing it. So they're looking for ways to blame the press and to some extent they're also working on the referees. But I think the criticism has helped journalists assess, “Okay, maybe we actually need to cover him more, not less.” By covering some of this behavior as if it were just another campaign stop, we are normalizing in some ways what we see as really crazy there.

And maybe the way they do that is to extend the audio clips, show five-minute video segments, and describe these events that have become so familiar to us as journalists who cover them that for some of them they are a Kind of nerds convey what it's like in a broader sense almost every day. So although the term “sane-washing” describes something that I think really never happened or describes a frustration that liberals tend to have with the coverage of Trump.

The term sparked some thought in the press, which has led to better reporting in recent days. Would this reporting have made a difference if the press had done it five or six weeks earlier? No. I mean, you know, we have a very small number of Americans who are undecided about who they're going to vote for, but they're not really undecided about what they think of Trump. There is no more well-known character in American politics.

Dimitri Sotis: In addition to all the other things he said, he talked about punishing journalists. If Donald Trump is indeed back in the Oval Office next year, what major challenges does that present? Not only would he argue with us while we tried to cover for him, but he also threatened to put some of us behind bars.

Tom Rosenstiel: Yes, I don't know. First, we don't know if this is a minor threat, a persistent threat, or a real threat. It's certainly dangerous talk. It is consistent with the demonization of the press and denigration of the First Amendment that he has pursued since the beginning of his presidency in 2017. It's scary. It's also not clear whether the courts would allow the things he wants to do, and it may well be trying to criminalize the behavior of news organizations you don't like versus those you like , is a bridge too far that even his supporters will understand that it is unconstitutional.

Dimitri Sotis: Doesn't it sound like you're seeing something like this happen here in America, even as a lot of other things are changing?

Tom Rosenstiel: You know, the challenge with Trump is that journalists have always staked their expertise on the idea that the future is like the past, only more so, and Trump has thrown that concept out the window. After Trump's election, the future was no longer like the past, only more so. So I'm not sure what any of us could predict what Trump would do as president, and certainly not what he would do regarding the press.

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