The big news of the past week has been Michael Wolff’s tell-all, inside-the-Trump-White-House book, “Fire and Fury.”
Hordes of Americans dashed out and bought it, even though newspapers and magazines and websites had already pulled out all the juicy stuff. Apparently, some of what’s in it is important, some not, but for anybody concerned about the present occupant of the White House, the book promises to be riveting, satisfying – and confirming. We’re not crazy. He is.
We have to take some of the book’s revelations with a grain of salt, because Wolff himself has a less-than-stellar reputation. New York Times writer Michael Grynbaum offered this quote from the late Times’ media columnist David Carr, writing about an earlier Wolff book: “Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong.”
Still, Wolff’s focus on the president’s intellect and his decision-making process is important. And similar stories have been told by others who have seen Trump in action.
We can argue about whether Donald Trump is sane and stable. But if the early excerpts from the book are any indication, Wolff simply reinforces one thing we should already know: This president is not at all qualified to lead the country. Intelligence, knowledge of history, intimate familiarity with the Constitution, a deep understanding of the nations and cultures of the world: these should be basic requirements.
A lot has already been written about Trump’s dislike of reading, and “Fire and Fury” apparently adds to the evidence. In The Atlantic, David Graham quotes this segment from the book, from an e-mail from Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn: “It’s worse than you can imagine… Trump won’t read anything – not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing.”
Trump does get the news – from Fox and Friends, which is both Trump-friendly and closely aligned with Trump on current issues.
But while we’re snorting about what we learn from “Fire and Fury,” should we ask how much better the rest of us are? In getting his news from television, Trump is simply mimicking the US population. That’s where most Americans get their news, according to a Pew Research report last summer. Television news, tough – even unbiased, “mainstream” television news – simply skims the surface of important developments.
Print ranks fourth out of four among Americans’ news sources, behind television, online, and radio, in that order. It may be encouraging that online ranks high, and we may read more than this president does, but as a country, on the left and the right, we’re getting lazy.
We’re also getting very selective in our reading, and in what we turn to as an online news source. Among the top five cable networks this past fall: the opinionated Fox and MSNBC.
And while it’s still a minority choice, 18 percent of Americans now rely on social media as one of their news sources.
We can’t possibly learn enough this way to be good citizens. But it’s quick and easy. Why read a daily newspaper – why subscribe to a local daily and a national daily and read them both – if you can scan the headlines on websites and get the really important stuff from Facebook?
As a print journalist, I’m not an impartial observer in this discussion, obviously. And I hope I’m right in thinking that whatever form journalism survives in, 50 years from now Americans will still think it’s important. But I do worry when I look at the data in the Pew research and think about how complicated the world will continue to be.
Presidents can’t get the news they need from Tweets and TV snippets and Fox and Friends or Rachel Maddow. And neither can citizens.
“We are what we read,” to quote a book review from Sunday’s New York Times. And I’m worried about what we’re reading, and how little.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2018.
Why read newspapers or news magazines? These sources offer precious little difference in content from the online soundbite world and you have to sift through mountains of print advertising to boot. They only come in handy for town and local news. In many cases they don’t report on anything of substance, or if they do are no less biased than any other source of news.
A handful of corporations now control nearly 100% of the above-board media offered up for popular consumption. We aren’t given “news”, we’re given a rationale for the policies and excuses of the political and corporate elites.
Print media sold the war in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, obscured (obscures) the truth about what is happening in Honduras, Colombia, and pedals the craziest of narratives daily in support of the official Govt line.
Why should Trump read the news? In the US, the Powers That Be “…when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that realityjudiciously, as you willwe’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
Thomas Jefferson —–
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.
I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
Miller – Quoting the Founders is an exercise in futility given how often their statements become self-contradictory. For example, Jefferson also wrote that, “the basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Additionally, your Jefferson quote is particularly amusing given that TJ was an early backer of “fake news” by his subsidizing the career of anti-Federalist publisher, propagandist and perennial liar, James Callender.
@ Arthur Hurrat
Believe me, TJ doesn’t speak for me but on a handful of subjects, but that quote was such a good response in this case I couldn’t resist.
I’m just pointing out that a failure to read the newspaper or Time or Newsweek does not = a lack of informed judgement. So few outlets do any real reporting anymore, and virtually 100% of what IS offered as news is really op-ed. The last Sunday paper I bought couldn’t have had 4 full pages of news in its entirety, and almost none of it international.
The easiest way to be accurately informed on Federal or international matters is just to wait for the next Govt functionary to make a proclamation and assume the opposite is gospel truth.
As for Trump, you don’t need to be well read to make things up. For a President or other policy maker, facts are something you occasionally catch a meaningless glimpse of, fluttering about in the rear view mirror.
An aide to presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson is purported to have said something like”You have the support of every thinking person in America.” To which the twice-failed candidate said: “Yes, but I need a majority.”
Rev. Richard S. Gilbert
Mr/Mrs/Ms Miller – I hope you realize that whatever point it is that you believe you are making is fatally undermined by such hyperbolic and patently false statements as, ” virtually 100% of what IS offered as news is really op-ed.” and, ” We aren’t given “news”, we’re given a rationale for the policies and excuses of the political and corporate elites.”
Richard Corey, I’d like for you to cite some examples of world or national news offered up by the Times, the Post, Time magazine etc where the facts were laid out for an objective appraisal by the reader, or where serious omissions were corrected after the fact.
Take for example the entire Russiagate “probe”. Based on the premise that the DNC servers were hacked by Russian agents. All the forensics were done by a private corporation. Only their analysis was given to the FBI, no government intelligence agency was given access to the actual crime scene. There is no evidence that can be presented before a judge or the public, only accusations, and yet the statement “Russian meddling” is repeated incessantly and taken as fact by many readers of MSM.
The same goes for the “Assad poison gas” story that omitted the fact CIA trained Syrian “rebels” in use and handling of Sarin and rebel cells in Turkey were arrested WITH the components for making Sarin long before the supposed attacks occurred.
The Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” story that was refuted at the time by UN weapons experts who received no air time in the US media.
I can go back to the Yugoslavia war where Milosevic was compared to a modern day Hitler but (surprise) recently exonerated by the IC at the Hague – the only UN collected evidence of systematic, institutional rape being that committed by our partners on the ground there, the KLA.
You can’t make this stuff up, but you can (if you are the government and with help from complicit news outlets) make up the rationales peddled to us for intervention in every one of these instances. Skepticism or outright disbelief should be the first reaction to ANY bit of national or international news. Only local sources like the City can be taken at face value.
And so it goes. The national news is designed to prevent objective appraisal of events, when it bothers to cover actual news in the first place.
Miller – That’s pretty funny. You say, “You can’t make this stuff up,”, but you just did. Congrats.
@Richard Corey – I’m waiting.
The only link I can no longer find is that implicating the KLA directly via UN report. I retract that statement with apology (though I will continue to look for it as I did read such a document). The rest of my assertions are 100% fact.
Milosevic exonerated:
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featu…
Iraq Weapons inspector accused of “drinking Saddam’s Kool Aid”
https://fair.org/take-action/media-advisor…
Syrian “rebels” in possession of Sarin arrested in Turkey:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05…
FBI never examined hacked DNC servers
http://thehill.com/policy/national-securit…
Human trafficking/sex slavery/organ trafficking KLA:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2011-03-27/kos…
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/ko…
KLA (our parteners on the ground) links to Al Qaeda:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/poli…