The Media Is Going to Make This a Long Four Years

On Friday, Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States of America. On Saturday, women across the country gathered to voice their concerns, anger, and frustration over things both related and unrelated to Donald Trump.

Not content to share the spotlight, Donald Trump gave a speech before the CIA, telling them their feud was blown out of proportion by the media. Press Secretary Sean Spicer came out and called the media liars because of their reporting of the crowd sizes and audience sizes during the inauguration. Near as anyone can tell, neither Trump nor Spicer were telling the truth.

The media responded as expected, and split coverage between the protests and Trump’s remarks. By Sunday, Trump’s remarks were the only thing anyone was talking about.

Whether or not you think Trump is playing the media like a pro or the media is just so hostile that they are making dumb decisions (these may not be mutually exclusive, I might add), the fact of the matter is that the media is doing exactly what it should not be doing when it comes to Donald Trump.

They are taking him personally.

I am already exhausted with their coverage of Trump, and it’s going to get worse. They are dead set on making everything about him. Every word he says will be a gaffe. Every action he takes will be offensive. Every time he breathes, it will get negative coverage.

He will respond to any and all negative coverage with a retaliatory tweet or send Spicer out to do it publicly (or both!). The media will look around and say “He’s attacking our credibility! To war!” and respond as they did this weekend.

We are going to get inundated with so much negative coverage of Trump that by 2020, everyone but Fox will have tanked in the ratings. Unless, of course, they change.

What does the media have to do? It’s really pretty easy: Stop taking everything so personally. Yes, he is the President of the United States, so literally everything he says and does is newsworthy. But it is not negative-coverage-worthy simply because he said it or attacked you.

What happens is that journalists, largely a bunch of twenty- to thirty-year-olds these days (though they are not the only guilty ones), have forgotten that one of the key rules of journalism is to report the story and not be the story. They are letting Trump make themselves the story and, in doing so, they hurt their own credibility.

Coverage of Trump has to be smart. It has to be equal parts tough and fair. You cannot go into a story about him with a clear agenda of your own.

Frankly, that’s what’s gotten you in this mess in the first place.

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