Media Madness review: Fox News host Kurtz stacks deck in favor of Trump
White House scenes well drawn but book does not balance criticism of media with critique of a Goodfellas president
From the looks of things, Trump both craves the media’s adoration and seeks to bend it to his will like some flexible funhouse mirror. Displeased with Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump called for a wholesale revision of America’s libel laws, first amendment be damned. The battle between the president and the press is now baked into our collective cake, a calcified feature not an errant bug.
Enter Howard Kurtz’s Media Madness, which seeks to provide an explanation and narrative for the never-ending scrum between this president and the press, or as Kurtz frames it, “the war over the truth”.
Kurtz, a Fox News commentator, apportions guilt between both sides. But he is quicker to point a finger at the media for having discounted Trump’s chances for winning in 2016 than he is to lay blame at the Trump’s feet for his embrace of alternative facts as a new reality form.
As Kurtz sees things, Trump is a surrogate for his electoral base of disenchanted white working-class voters and therefore should be afforded greater patience even as he tramples on the truth. Media Madness acknowledges that Trump is “loose with his language”, fails to “vet” his pronouncements and “sometimes regurgitates half-baked comments”. Despite all this, Kurtz places the onus on the media, contending that it mistakenly takes Trump literally while arguing that Trump’s casualness does not always merit a press-driven fusillade.
The problem with this approach is that it requires a degree of calibration usually found among fine-precision instruments, and definitely not in Kurtz’s own body of work. For the record, the Daily Beast ejected Kurtz from its employ for journalistic shoddiness. Beyond that, Trump’s own flexibility with the truth helped trigger special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible obstruction charges.
Going back to May 2017, Trump’s explanation as to why he dismissed FBI director James Comey came across as clumsy verbal acrobatics, if not downright deceitful. Trump went from blaming Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to admitting to NBC’s Lester Holt that he, Trump, was the ultimate decider of Comey’s fate, and that allegations of Russian interference were the driving force in his determination.
Media Madness is on far stronger ground with its portrayal of the White House as a chaotic, seat-of-the-pants operation, which at times resembles a cross between Lord of the Flies and Goodfellas. Sean Spicer – the first White House press secretary, succeeded by Sarah Sanders after the bizarre interregnum of communications director Anthony Scaramucci – is seen to oppose Trump attending a sit down with the New York Times. Angered, Trump sounds less presidential and more like Joe Pesci.
In Kurtz’s telling, Trump tears into Spicer, yelling: “I know how to fucking take care of myself!” The scene is in the same tenor in which, according to Joshua Green’s The Devil’s Bargain, Trump laced into Paul Manafort, his one-time campaign manager who is now under federal indictment: “ You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”
Parenthetically, Kurtz also writes that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was displeased that Spicer was not more aggressively defending him and Donald Jr, while Scaramucci lamented that Spicer could have done more to shield Kushner. In other words, the White House was a family business.
Trump cancelled the Times meeting and attacked the paper on Twitter. Then, having then expended his wrath, Trump finally met with the Times but set up Reince Priebus, his first chief of staff, to take the blame for the mess.
The book also recalls Trump telling Scaramucci he was a tough SOB. In that vein, unlike Wolff who portrayed Scaramucci as a more of hanger-on than a player, Kurtz describes “the Mooch” as a Trump confidante. Indeed, during transition Scaramucci actually vetted prospective Trump appointees alongside a former congressman, a former ambassador and a senior Kushner deputy.
Kurtz also shares a vignette depicting tension between Kellyanne Conway and Kushner concerning Conway’s access to the Oval Office. Conway had read reports Kushner sought to limit her walk-in privileges. In turn, Kushner denied he had anything to do with that episode of palace intrigue and told Conway: “You know I love you.”
As to be expected, Kurtz goes easy on Fox News, his current employer. He notes that Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro are Trump’s favorite interviewers, but writes that the news desk can hold Trump’s feet to the fire.
What Kurtz is actually describing is asymmetrical coverage. The fact is that last week, Hannity and Fox could barely report that Trump had contemplated firing Mueller last June, a story that Kurtz actually unpacks with some detail and which Trump, Conway and Trump’s counsel actually denied all along.
In the end, Media Matters succeeds as another window on the dysfunction that characterizes Trump’s White House. As a critique of the media, it comes up short. It captures the mainstream’s visible biases but it also lets the president off way too easily. Kurtz bemoans the media’s tarnished reputation but says little of Trump’s. That’s called stacking the deck.
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