Trump, media skip honeymoon, resume hostile relationship

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) — Representatives of major news networks met with President-elect Donald Trump Monday amid press concerns about access to his administration and Trump’s complaints about alleged media bias, according to CNN.

The off-the-record meeting was reportedly attended by executives and anchors from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox. There are many issues that may have been up for discussion.

Trump had a particularly contentious relationship with the media during his campaign, ranting about their supposed dishonesty during his rallies and urging his followers to boo and jeer at them. He has threatened to change laws to make it easier for him to sue reporters over stories he feels are inaccurate. He has not held a press conference since July.

Major media outlets have also faced wide-ranging criticism for their treatment of Trump and his policies. NBC News has been questioned by even other journalists over a tweet Sunday that mischaracterized a comment by Reince Priebus, Trump’s choice for chief of staff, about his proposed Muslim ban.

In the wake of failing to see Trump’s victory coming and underestimating the depth of his support, the mainstream media is now confronting fresh questions about its credibility and any missteps made in coverage of the transition will only reinforce those doubts.

“The media is much more critical in this cycle than it was eight years ago or in 2000,” said John Burke, author of “Presidential Transitions: From Politics to Practice” and a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, although he added that may be driven by the unique circumstances of this election and of Trump’s candidacy.

Trump has been more critical of the media than previous presidents as well. As he continues to attack the New York Times and other media outlets on Twitter, reporters have begun looking more closely at his business ties and conflicts of interest.

“At the time, there were so many moving parts to the campaign, there was so much news being generated by both Hillary and Trump that it was sort of hard to focus on any one thing,” said Nikki Usher, an assistant professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.

“With the additional time, people have found a couple of new morsels here and there,” she said.

Trump and his aides have complained often about the scrutiny he now faces. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN Monday that he is using Twitter to “cut through the nonsense” by complaining about the cast of “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live” skits.

Conway insisted people should focus more on what Trump is sacrificing to serve as president rather than the ongoing dissent against him and the potential legal and ethical conflicts he has created.

"This network and other people will always be focused on divisions. How about accepting the election results, Chris, and letting him form a government?" Conway said.

Experts say Trump’s transition is moving along at a typical pace. Trump’s nominees for attorney general, CIA director, and national security advisor were announced Friday and he continues to meet with many candidates for his other cabinet positions.

“Each transition sort of has its own tempo In terms of the timing, this is pretty typical,” Burke said.

Trump is ahead of President Obama’s transition timeline in announcing his first cabinet choices, and President Bill Clinton did not choose his chief of staff until mid-December.

Former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod has stepped up to defend the Trump transition team against criticism for not moving swiftly enough on cabinet appointments.

“Lots of reasons to be concerned about @realDonaldTrump transition but the pace of announcements isn't one of them. That's not a fair shot,” he tweeted last week.

“I think so far they’ve done exactly what experts suggested,” said Karen Hult, chair of the political science department at Virginia Tech University and a member of the nonpartisan White House Transition Project.

Trump started with his top White House staff positions and moved on to filling key national security posts. Hult said the people he has chosen are largely in line with the beliefs and priorities he laid out during his campaign.

“Last week, everyone was talking about the transition being in disarray, but what evidence was there for the transition being in disarray?” said political consultant Gary Nordlinger.

He sees some signs of an anti-Trump bias in the coverage of the transition, but not an overt one.

“I don’t think it’s a conscious bias against Donald Trump as much as they’re using words that convey a bias,” he said.

One challenge for assessments of the Trump transition and the media response to it is that Trump has never been a normal candidate, is not a normal president-elect, and likely will not be a normal president.

“How do you really approach this in a standard way when nothing about the president-elect is standard?” she said. “He is totally uncharted territory.”

Trump is already bucking many of the norms of the presidency, and his direct communication with the public through social media is an unprecedented practice that the press has not quite gotten a grasp on how to report.

If Trump continues to tweet his thoughts on the media and popular culture at all hours of the day from the White House, the media will need to decide how newsworthy it truly is, because every word a president says matters to some degree.

“Every single thing the president does or says is a form of strategic communication,” Usher said. “This is like crafting a message To think these are not strategic messages designed with a political intention is inaccurate.”

Trump’s threats to the freedom of the press also complicate coverage. His behavior since the election has reinforced genuine fears about his attitude toward First Amendment rights.

“It is not a form of paranoia to worry about our basic liberties under the rule of a thin-skinned and vindictive man who lashes out at even the restrained criticism issued by the ‘Hamilton’ cast on Friday,” E.J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post Sunday, pointing to Trump’s tweet that “This should not happen!”

“A lot of mainstream journalists I think are concerned that a Trump Administration will really quash down on their ability to effectively serve as a point of critique,” Usher said.

Like Trump, the election was also unusual. Despite a substantial lead in electoral votes, Trump is trailing Clinton by 1.7 million popular votes with more still to be counted, Hult observed. That makes 2000 a slightly more apt point of comparison than 2008, but even that race was vastly different from this one.

Experts are unsurprised to see Trump getting battered in the press, and some say Clinton would not be treated much better if she won.

Both candidates had record-high unfavorable ratings, were widely distrusted by voters, and had been in the national public eye for decades. Those factors may contribute to Trump not getting the kind of latitude from the press that past president-elects have seen.

“I was predicting no matter who wins, they’re not getting a honeymoon,” Nordlinger said.

The media landscape itself has changed drastically since the last presidential transition. Burke noted that political news sites are more prevalent and information is easier to find than in 2008. As a result, there are a lot more eyeballs following the transition than in the past.

Some of the names under consideration for cabinet posts and White House jobs are also atypical, and that has at times shifted the focus of coverage. Trump’s selection of former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon as chief strategist, for example, has drawn attention to the white nationalist alt-right fringe that the site has become a platform for.

“He’s an unconventional candidate who’s brought out to the forefront unconventional people that most of America isn’t used to dealing with,” Usher said.

Whether the media is prepared to give Trump a honeymoon period or not, the public might be. A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Monday showed a significant boost in Trump’s favorability since the election.

He is still under 50 percent and significantly trailing Obama’s 54 percent approval rating, but he has seen a 9-point jump in two weeks to 46 percent. This suggests the public is growing to accept him, either despite or because of his flouting of traditional political norms.

“The traditional media and the political establishments of both parties had better get used to dancing to Donald Trump’s tune, because if he starts dancing to their tune, it’s going to be a disaster for him,” Nordlinger said.

If public opinion continues to drift in Trump’s direction, the press risks making the same mistakes that his opponents made during the primaries. Everyone who was seen as an “establishment” figure challenging him swiftly fell.

The media should not take that as an imperative to go easy on Trump or ignore his scandals, but Nordlinger said they should not necessarily expect such stories to sink him.

“The more traditional establishment are perceived as picking on the guy, the more his supporters like him.”