Minority report

I’m one of 372 people outside the ballroom of the Washington Hilton who watched Hasan Minhaj’s speech at the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner this weekend. It’s usually a cross between a high school talent show and a Friars Club roast, all centered around the occupant of the White House. But the occupant of the White House has usually had an actual sense of humor plus a thick skin, and of course that’s not the case this year.

In fact, the Kleptocrat announced with extended lower lip in February that he would not be attending the WHCD, the first president since Ronald Reagan to skip the event. (Reagan was recovering from an assassination attempt, and even then he phoned in to make a couple of jokes and take his lumps from the journos.) Then the Cheeto-in-Chief directed his Gauleiters to also abstain. Because these people literally cannot take a joke.

Instead the Kleptocrat went to Harrisburg, Penn., to hold a party rally (yes), where he told porkies about how large the crowd was there. The guy really doesn’t understand how the whole smartphone camera, connectivity and social media thing works:

Also—what is it about this guy and size?

The rally was his platform for lying about all his accomplishments during his first hundred days in office. He filled in the space between lies with pouting about the people who are so unfair to him—the press—who he would have us believe were secretly wishing they were up in Pennsylvania instead of at the dinner.

Okay, but back to Minhaj. He said a few things that I thought were dead on target—not directly to do with the Kleptocrat, but with the absolutely critical role the press—the free press—has to play in not only combating the rising tide of fascism, but in the fundamental survival of democracy. He started with a jokey survey of the various media outlets in attendance, before getting around to CNN, the USA Today of broadcast news. (Actually, earlier he took on USA Today, and was pretty funny.)

“CNN is here, baby. Now you guys got some really weird trust issues going on with the public. I’m not going to call you fake news, but everything isn’t breaking news. You can’t go to DEFCON 1 just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturizer.”

And this is true—the media in some ways are their own worst enemies, rushing all over the place trying to get something out there before it appears on some blog in Dubuque. Also, leaving aside the failure to confirm the veracity of their stories, they dilute their impact when every story is slapped up as a stop-the-presses kind of breaking news jobber.

Minhaj also calls it correctly when he talks about it being a trust issue. It’s not just the Kelptocrat and the Gauleiters and the Repugnants muddying the waters with their screeches about fake news every time someone reports what they’ve said and done. Although Lord knows, they are muddying the waters. But he goes on to nail it:

“I know I’m busting balls. I don’t have a solution on how to win back trust. I don’t. But in the age of [the Kleptocrat], I know that you guys have to be more perfect now more than ever. Because you are how the president gets his news. Not from advisers, not from experts, not from intelligence agencies, you guys. So that’s why you gotta be on your A-game. You gotta be twice as good. You can’t make any mistakes. Because when one of you messes up, he blames your entire group. And now you know what it feels like to be a minority.”

I don’t much give a toss about the media being accurate reporters because they’re how the Kleptocrat gets his information—he’s going to cherry pick whatever fact or fiction suits his notional reality, whatever gets him what he wants in any given moment. I do care that the news media be able to demonstrate integrity and rigor in publishing or broadcasting because I need to trust them. And because all thoughtful, truth-seeking people need to trust them. And because somewhere along the line, the courts of justice and of history are going to need to be able to trust them as a source of facts about this administration and our society.

I also think he called it when he categorized the press as a minority—both collectively and individually held responsible for the actions of the worst among them. You screw up—everyone with a press pass (and their editors and their publishers) takes the hit. One reporter from the not-failing New York Times elides a statue in the Oval Office (subsequently correcting the mistake), and the second-rate Goebbels starts screaming how every news story is massively fake. And he’s believed.

That’s exactly how minorities are viewed in this society, and I think it would be really good for the news industry to consider that—both as it applies to themselves and to how they report on other minorities. If a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel misspells some Gauleiter’s wife’s name, the entire US Press Association should not have to file affidavits abjuring misspelling Gauleiters’ wives’ names. Ditto seeking statements from black, or Muslim, or Asian community leaders when one of their members goes postal.

(Although, of course we do want to encourage all reporters to verify the spelling of Gauleiters’ wives’ names—and everyone else’s names, as well as all other facts in their stories that they can cram in and still meet their deadlines. Because see above about being the trusted source of news about the world we live in and will leave to our descendants. When the Kleptocrat, his Gauleiters and the Repugnants in Congress can lie about things they have been recorded saying and doing—those records are all that stand between us and a Buñuel film.)

Like Minhaj, I don’t have any solution, just a suggestion—that they do not debase their journalistic coinage and turn out crap like Breitbart or the Drudge Report. And that they hold fast against the threats that the Kleptocrat is thinking about changing libel laws, making it easier to sue publications. Because the hometown paper absolutely has it right: