The Press and the President

Summary

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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: The Press and the President

Date: March 17, 2017
Host: Evan Osnos
Guest: Andrew Marantz (Staff Writer, The New Yorker)

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Episode Overview

This episode of "The Political Scene" delves into the intensifying and often adversarial relationship between the Trump administration and the American press. Evan Osnos interviews Andrew Marantz about the administration's tactics in redefining White House media access, the rise of new, ideologically-driven journalists, and the broader implications for democracy. Marantz, who recently published a piece titled "Trolling the President Press Corps," provides first-hand observations and analysis of the shifting journalistic landscape and the strategies at play from both sides.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Trump Administration’s Disruption of Press Traditions

• Rex Tillerson’s Foreign Trip Controversy

  • Secretary of State Tillerson excluded the regular diplomatic press pool, inviting only a single reporter from the Independent Journal Review, a conservative millennial-focused outlet.
  • State Department spokesman Mark Toner defended the choice as "outside the box," emphasizing the intent to include non-traditional media (02:01).

• Andrew Marantz on Motivations

  • The administration claims to be “opening up to new media outlets” and "democratizing the press corps," but Marantz suggests there are dual motives: part genuine outreach, part deliberate provocation.
  • He defines "trolling" as doing something with the intent to provoke a specific reaction, a tactic he believes is actively being used against the traditional press to make them appear self-important and out of touch (03:04).

2. Changes to the White House Press Corps

• Introduction of Skype Seats and Alternative Outlets

  • Sean Spicer has brought in “Skype seats” for regional reporters and called on little-known blogs, disrupting established press dynamics.
  • Some in the press worry new voices could lead to a "diversity of journalistic practice,” potentially undermining the standard of asking rigorous, meaningful questions (05:10).

• Debate Over ‘Softball’ Questions

  • Example: At a press conference with President Trump and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, a Daily Caller reporter asked a broad national security question rather than addressing the scandal of the day (Michael Flynn)—infuriating other journalists (07:11).
  • Marantz points out there's no rule against such questions, but it's sparking internal debates about journalistic purpose and standards.

3. Strategic Undermining of Media Legitimacy

• The Breitbart/Bannon Legacy

  • The episode references a 2011 quote from Andrew Breitbart: "The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. I am at war to gain back control of the American narrative." Marantz argues Breitbart's heirs (including Steve Bannon and Trump) are well on their way to achieving this by flipping trust: “If the suits on the mainstream media are saying it, that’s how you know it’s not true.” (10:04).

• Trump and the Media: A Co-dependent Relationship

  • Trump both courts media attention and vilifies criticism, spinning press skepticism into an asset with his base: "Trump says something, the media says he’s lying, and then Trump can turn to his base and say, ‘Who do you choose to believe?’” (12:00 approx).

4. Rise of Ideologically-Driven Newcomers

• Profile: Lucian Wintrich (Gateway Pundit)
  • Marantz describes following Wintrich, a young, provocative right-wing blogger granted White House access, whose main currency is provoking both the left and the traditional right (13:34).
  • Wintrich’s goal: Not classic policy arguments, but cultural disruption and attention. He represents the blending of activism and journalism in the Trump era.

5. The Press Reassesses Its Role

• Media Soul-Searching

  • Reflecting on coverage choices during the 2016 election, Osnos asks if reporters are evaluating their “morally neutral” reporting style—the focus on “who’s up, who’s down”—and whether this inadvertently elevated Trump (16:58).

• Limits of Objectivity and Emergence of New Lines

  • Marantz challenges the myth of absolute objectivity: “Once you get beyond this simplistic and, I think, false notion that it’s possible to get the unfiltered, unvarnished, unbiased truth, I don’t think that’s possible.” (17:38)
  • Now, with overt falsehoods from the podium, journalists are forced to re-draw moral and practical boundaries, with more explicit fact-checking and calling out of official lies.

6. The State and Future of Journalism

• Resurgence of Robust Reporting
  • Osnos and Marantz agree that, despite the challenges, investigative journalism is experiencing a renaissance, with both liberal and conservative outlets producing strong reporting (19:16).
  • Marantz: “Now more than ever, this is a time when journalism is self-evidently important… This is an opportunity for institutions like CNN to frankly get some of their legitimacy back.” (19:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Administration's Tactics:

  “I use the word trolling… doing something or saying something in order to get a specific reaction from people. And that is certainly an aspect of what’s going on… It’s a distraction from whatever policy issues you don’t want the press to be discussing.”
  — Andrew Marantz (03:04)

• On Journalism Standards:

  “I love geographic diversity, I love even ideological diversity. What I don’t love is diversity of journalistic practice.”
  — Paraphrased from seasoned correspondent via Marantz (05:10)

• On the Battle for Narrative:

  “If the suits on the mainstream media are saying it, that’s how you know it’s not true. And I think… Steve Bannon being most visible among them, have made an enormous amount of progress.”
  — Andrew Marantz (10:04)

• On the Role of Provocation in New Media:

  "The highest goal in some cases is to take a liberal snowflake and make them really upset and trigger them or whatever the terminology is... He [Wintrich] would rather shock you into paying attention to him..."
  — Andrew Marantz (13:34–15:47)

• On Limits of Press Objectivity:

  “Once you get beyond this simplistic and, I think, false notion that it’s possible to get the unfiltered, unvarnished, unbiased truth, I don’t think that’s possible.”
  — Andrew Marantz (17:38)

• On the Importance of Journalism Now:

  "Now more than ever, this is a time when journalism is self-evidently important. And I think journalists are for the most part doing a good job taking advantage of that momentum.”
  — Andrew Marantz (19:52)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Tillerson Excludes Press Pool & Administration Motives – 01:16–04:31
• How the Press Corps Is Changing – 04:31–07:05
• The ‘Softball Question’ Debate – 07:05–09:11
• Controlling the Narrative: Breitbart/Bannon – 09:11–12:27
• Profile: Lucian Wintrich (Gateway Pundit) – 13:11–15:47
• Media Soul-Searching Post-2016 – 15:47–19:16
• Journalism’s New Path Forward – 19:16–21:18

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Conclusion

This episode provides a nuanced exploration of the Trump administration’s approach to the press, the intentional mixing of genuine innovation with political gamesmanship, and the resulting introspection among journalists. With the introduction of new faces and practices into the White House briefing room, longstanding assumptions about the press’s function and authority in American democracy are undergoing stress and transformation. Yet, as Marantz and Osnos reflect, the adversity has catalyzed a resurgence of purpose and quality in American journalism.

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Transcript

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[Evan Osnos]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Friday, March 17th. I'm Evan Osnos, staff writer at the New Yorker, filling in for Dorothy Wickenden. This week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson broke with a long standing tradition by setting off on a major foreign trip, in this case to Asia at a moment of high tension with North Korea without allowing the diplomatic press pool to come along. He chose only one reporter to join him on his plane, a 33 year old journalist from the Independent Journal Review, a conservative website geared for millennials, which was founded in 2012. At a press briefing on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner defended the decision.

[Mark Toner]

And I can say going forward. Sorry, let me finish. And I can say going forward that, and I've said this, that every effort will be made to accommodate a press contingent on board the plane. But in this specific trip and instance it was decided to take to make an outside the box, if I could put it that way, decision to bring somebody in who, who doesn't necessarily cover the State Department, a media outlet that isn't steeped in foreign policy.

[Evan Osnos]

Andrew Moretz joins me to discuss the escalating war between the American press and the Trump administration and whether it's as threatening to democracy as some observers fear. Thanks for being here, Andrew. For two months now, we've watched the administration abandon one convention after another when it comes to its relationship with the press. This week you published a piece in the magazine called Trolling the President Press Corps. So help us make some sense of this if you would. Is the administration, as it says, thinking outside the box, or is it trolling the press? And for that matter, really, what's the difference between the two?

[Andrew Marantz]

I do think it's a little bit of both. I think, you know, the stated aim of bringing in new voices, democratizing the press corps, opening up to new media outlets, Internet savvy media outlets. Those are all good on paper. And to some extent, that is genuinely what's going on. I think at the same time there is something else going on, which is, you know, I use the word trolling. I don't know if that word is in the dictionary yet, but the definition that I know is doing something or saying something in order to get a specific reaction from people. And that is certainly an aspect of what's going on, too, because, you know, the press can always be relied upon to react to any slights with wounded egos and pious sermons about how, you know, the press is very important. And that is a good political plan for the Trump administration. By good, I mean effective, because everyone hates the mainstream press across the political spectrum. So if you can get the press talking in kind of wounded, highfalutin terms about how great they are, A, it's a distraction from whatever policy issues you don't want the press to be discussing, and B, it just makes everyone look at them with disdain. And then you have a foil against which you suddenly somehow look noble.

[Evan Osnos]

So let's look in more detail at what's actually changing at the moment. You spent time with the White House press corps. You went to briefings and you described at one point that press Secretary Sean Spicer calls on reporters now from little known blogs. And he's also played around with the old rules that governed the way the White House press corps worked. He's added a line of TV screens with reporters from news outlets around the country, and that has perhaps inevitably become known as the Skype seats. What else is going on? What's changing and what really matters here?

[Andrew Marantz]

One of the reporters in the room on Twitter referred to the Skype seats as The Skype O fants people have worried that those questions tend to be, you know, a little bit soft, a little bit doting. Look, the larger frame of this, again, this is why this is so politically savvy on the part of the administration. There is no part of that that is a in contravention of any law or rule. There's nothing in the Constitution that says that CBS has to be called on before the Daily Caller. The media is changing extremely quickly and the notion that we can sort of wrinkle our nose at a web first or a web only media outlet is truly quaint and obsolete at this point. So it's very easy to frame this discussion as a bunch of pearl clutching. And you know, why are we even bothering to pay attention to the press? The press is not the story here. And I think the answer is, look, there is nothing wrong in principle with bringing in new voices. But what some of the people, some of the more seasoned correspondents told me when I was talking to people in that room, one person said, I love geographic diversity, I love even ideological diversity. What I don't love is diversity of journalistic practice. And I think the notion that there is some value to being experienced, to having learned how to ask questions in a way that's more pointed and more likely to yield a meaningful answer. In a way they seem kind of like old fashioned values that in normal times we wouldn't have to talk about. But I think now just the basic notion that reporters should ask genuine, straightforward, tough questions is pretty directly being challenged by the administration. So I think that has become more of a focus and a source of concern for people in the room.

[Evan Osnos]

What's an example of one of these kind of softball questions that has been asked at a Trump press conference that comes to mind?

[Andrew Marantz]

Well, the one that got a lot of attention and I think it's an interesting one cuz there are two ways to look at it. So I was there on a week that started with a press conference with the President and a visiting head of state. So Trump was hosting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. They met in the Oval Office and then they moved into the East Room to take questions from reporters. Trudeau called on two Canadian reporters and Trump called on two American reporters. And this was a moment of high tension because the story of the day was Mike Flynn. And this was the moment. You know, it was a kind of textbook hold the President's feet to the fire moment. And the two outlets he called on were Sinclair Broadcasting, which was alleged to have made some quasi nefarious deals with the Trump campaign. And then the Daily Caller and the young woman from the Daily Caller stood up and basically said, Mr. President, what are the greatest national security issues facing our country? Which seemed to many people like a prototypical softball question. There was an uproar in the room. There were people tweeting during the press conference about how annoyed they were at this question. Annoyed is even too weak a word. People were outraged. And, you know, I talked to her the next day, and she made a defense for herself. She said, look, I'm not there to ask the same question that everybody else would have asked. If we're all interchangeable, then we why are we all in the room? You know, I had a question I wanted to ask about national security. Maybe I could have phrased it differently, but I stand by the question. And, you know, that really gets to the heart of these concerns. You know, I understand why people wanted her to ask about Flynn. Flynn was the story of the day. It's certainly what CNN or ABC or the AP would have asked about. But she asked about something different. And there is no rule that says she can't.

[Evan Osnos]

You know, oftentimes when we hear these kinds of intramural squabbles about the dynamics of the White House press corps, it can seem immaterial, except to those who say, well, no, these are the sort of small building blocks that constitute a democratic political culture. Making sure that you have rigorous questioning of public officials, making sure that you do have real access for news organizations. One of the things you highlighted in your story, which is really interesting, is this sort of underlying long running dynamic. And you quoted Andrew Breitbart, of course, who was the founder of Breitbart, where Steve Bannon was the chairman. You quoted Breitbart writing in 2011, quote, the left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. I am at war to gain back control of the American narrative. Unquote. What does he mean by that? And frankly, has that happened?

[Andrew Marantz]

I think he's on his way posthumously to achieving it. I don't think we're all the way there yet. He, like many, many figures on the extreme right, grew up in liberal, placid, in his case, Brentwood, Los Angeles. And it took him years before he pierced what he saw as that bubble of misinformation and started his conservative awakening. And I think when you have that personal awakening, it seems to you like there was a big conspiracy going on the whole time to keep you in the dark. At least this is the narrative. The personal narrative that Andrew Breitbart describes in his memoir. His goal was to discredit the power that these organizations had over the minds and hearts of the average American and to move us as far away as possible from the Walter Cronkite days when if you saw a man in a suit saying something on television, you assumed it must be true. Andrew Breitbart's vision and the vision of a lot of other people who were in that movement with him, including Steve Bannon, was to turn that on its head, to say if the suits on the mainstream media are saying it, that's how you know it's not true. And I think that the heirs to that strategy, Steve Bannon being most visible among them, have made an enormous amount of progress. And by the way, they found a perfect fellow traveler in Donald Trump who has always had what I call in the piece, a co dependent relationship with the media. You know, he needs them, he loves the attention, he feeds off it, he makes money off it. And yet if there's ever a critical word about him in the press, he freaks out and feels personally insulted. So you have in Donald Trump this mix of, I think, genuine aggrievement and then a more strategic thing going on where he says, okay, if I can turn this into a referendum on the trustworthiness of the guy wearing the suit behind the desk, then I kind of have a blank check where I can spin and say things that are self contradictory and say things without any evidence behind them. Trump says something, the media says he's lying, and then Trump can turn to his base and say, who do you choose to believe? I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director.

[Evan Osnos]

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[Lauren Good]

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[Andrew Marantz]

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[Evan Osnos]

In your piece. You follow one of these new arrivals in the press corps, a sort of linear descendant of the Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon idea of journalism and its Relation to politics. And the guy's name is Lucian Wintrich. He's a 28 year old writer for a right wing blog called the Gateway Pundit. Tell us a bit about Wintrich and what you discovered by following him around for a while.

[Andrew Marantz]

Yeah, so Lucien, like some of the other people I was describing, started off as a kind of standard liberal. He went to Bard College and at some point he, you know, saw through the matrix and said, I am now a Barry Goldwater conservative. And the way that I'm going to perpetuate my politics is by getting a rise out of people. This, this is a common thread around certain right wing areas of the Internet. The highest goal in some cases is to take a liberal snowflake and make them really upset and trigger them or whatever the terminology is. So Lucian is a specialist at this. He also likes triggering the snowflakes on the religious right. He's gay. He likes to take lots of photographs of young men that he calls his Twinks for Trump series. And he likes to put them up in the background at Republican events and sort of watch church ladies as they freak out and say, this is not my Republican Party.

[Evan Osnos]

So let me stop you right there for a second. Does he have an affirmative set of ideas? Is he driven actually by any political content?

[Andrew Marantz]

He does have an ideology. His laptop has a huge decal on the back of it that says Goldwater in big, bold letters. So he has read the conscience of a conservative. He has read Reagan's memoirs, he's read Charles Murray. But he doesn't go into situations like the press briefing room and start arguing with people about tax policy. He doesn't think that is tactically the right way to approach it. He would rather shock you into paying attention to him than, and then maybe leading you down the road a little bit until you get to see what's motivating him and what the ideology is behind it. Now, obviously it's polarizing and he loses a lot of people that way, but what he gains is a higher profile and he gets people like me, for better or worse, to pay attention to him.

[Evan Osnos]

There's also an argument that by throwing up all the pieces in the air, that actually the Trump White House might be inadvertently altering the chemistry of the press core in an interesting way and perhaps even in a productive way out of this. What had become, I think, a kind of default setting of morally neutral who's up, who's down coverage that was really dominating the campaign. It was one of the reasons why Trump got as far as he did. And let's listen just for a second to what has now become really an infamous clip from last February, when Donald Trump called in to MSNBC's Morning Joe to speak with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

[Andrew Marantz]

You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it. And not necessarily supporters, but at least believers. You said there's some potential there. Well, I will tell you what, when you say supporter, you're obviously you're talking about how actually there were a handful of people who for six months have been saying what happened last night, night could happen. And the rest of the media world has been.

[Evan Osnos]

But let me clarify what supporters has.

[Andrew Marantz]

Been mocking and ridiculing exactly what he's done.

[Evan Osnos]

Since then, we've heard some soul searching by members of the press about whether it did enough to scrutinize Trump's campaign or whether it did at times kind of amble into the position of being believers or supporters, as he put it. But did you sense that there is a real reassessment going on, that veteran political reporters are beginning to ask themselves whether this kind of morally desiccated approach of just covering the person with the biggest audience or the person who seems to be doing the sexiest or most outrageous thing on any given day is in fact the process that led to a White House that now has put them into this predicament?

[Andrew Marantz]

This is difficult and in some cases even uncomfortable to talk about because we all like remaining on this very easy level of platitude where we can say the press's job is to tell the truth and the press's job is to report without fear or favor. Of course that is true. But once you get beyond this simplistic and, I think, false notion that it's possible to get the unfiltered, unvarnished, unbiased truth, I don't think that's possible. I think that's just used as a cudgel in these kind of ideological debates where people go, your news is fake news. No. Your news is biased. No. Your news is filtered. Everything is going to be selected. Everything is going to be put in some context. So those things are now coming into sharper focus. I think now you can have a situation where the press secretary is so openly lying that it's in some cases literally laughable. There was a moment a couple of days ago or a few days ago when Sean Spicer was asked, okay, so before Trump was president, he said that the statistics that came out of the government about the unemployment rate were phony. And now that he is President and those statistics are favorable to him. He's saying they're true. Which one is it? And Spicer sort of said, yeah, they were fake then, but they're true now. Ha ha ha ha. And everybody in the room started laughing. There was always spin, there was always lying. But now you just have a different kind of journalism now. The opposition is a little bit clearer now the diverting of access journalism is a little bit clearer. And now those moral lines are having to be drawn in a way that they were never drawn explicitly before.

[Evan Osnos]

I think it's also worth noting here that in the midst of some of this fear and loathing, there is also some extraordinary journalism going on. I mean, there has been this resurgence of investigative reporting. There is a real feast of good work going on. And also on television, you've begun to see a very different posture from people like Jake Tapper on CNN who is not shrinking away from the task of calling out lies. Where do you see this going, Andrew? Do you get the feeling that in the end the press is going to be able to find a new path here and is it finding a new path already?

[Andrew Marantz]

I think that is fair and worth pointing out. And I also think it's worth pointing out that there are plenty of people from Fox News, from Fox Radio, from the Wall Street Journal, which is a Rupert Murdoch owned publication. The so called liberal media does not by any means have a monopoly on tough, groundbreaking reporting on the Trump administration. This is, you know, the, the. My wife's joke is that everything these days has to be prefaced by the phrase now more than ever. But now more than ever, this is a time when journalism is self evidently important. And I think journalists are for the most part doing a good job of taking advantage of that momentum. This is an opportunity for institutions like CNN to frankly get some of their legitimacy back. And I think for the most part mainstream organizations left, right and center are doing a good job at that. Whether people are listening, watching, paying attention, whether it moves the needle, whether people care, you know, we'll have to wait and see. But I definitely do think that the sentiment that now is a good time to be a journalist and an important time to be a journalist is well taken. And I think people are proving that every day.

[Evan Osnos]

Andrew, thanks very much for coming on today. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review the political scene on itunes. This podcast is produced by Alex Barron for New York, with help from Daniel Wenger. I'm Evan Osnos. America is changing and so is the world.

[Andrew Marantz]

But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.

[Lauren Good]

I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. hi.

[Andrew Marantz]

I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.

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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.

[Andrew Marantz]

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mark Toner]

From.

[Evan Osnos]

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