David Corn is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a progressive political magazine. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for The Nation. He is also the author of numerous books, including The Lies of George W. Bush. Corn graduated from Brown University in 1982.
BPR: Is the best tactic for reporting on the Trump administration to cover everything or to focus on the bigger issues?
DC: Chaos is Trump’s modus operandi. He loves having the ability to discombobulate and to throw out new shiny objects that the media has to chase after. He’s done this like no other politician or president has ever done. Barack Obama’s birth certificate was not a real issue, but he made it one by insisting that the first African American president was not born here. It was an outright racist move. He did it to get attention, and he got attention. The unfortunate thing for reporters and journalists is that anything a president does sort of counts. If he goes on and on about the size of his inaugural crowd, as trivial an issue as it is, the fact that it’s the president who is doing it makes it hard to ignore. It’s like covering a circus, except a circus is a diversion from normal life. With Trump, it’s like covering a circus that does matter. The only advice that I have is that we need reporters covering the horrendous story of his interactions with a war widow and covering the story of what he’s doing with North Korea. The real challenge is for the citizenry absorbing all of this to sort out what’s important and what’s not.
BPR: You were a harsh critic of President George W. Bush because of his unprecedented dishonesty. Is that situation analogous to what Trump is doing now? If so, why is the media today more aggressively calling out the president’s lies?
DC: When it came to a lot of key policy issues, Bush and his aides kept putting forth false assertions and predicates, whether it was about privatizing social security or lowering taxes on the rich. It was an expansion of the normal use of spin. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, they made the case for war on the basis of multiple assertions that were not true. But saying that the Bush administration was lying was something a lot of the media were not ready to do. They criticized me and others who would make this case, and called us hyper-partisan.
One role of the media should be to point out when important people say important things that are false. Trump uses an excess of false statements on matters large and small. Sometimes it’s about his past positions, like saying he opposed the Iraq war, or that climate change is a hoax. Other matters are small, like the size of his inaugural crowd and being on the cover of Time Magazine more than anybody else. His excessive reliance on statements that he knows or has reason to know are false puts the media in a tough position. They can’t just report on lie after lie without confronting the fact that he’s set a Guinness record for lying in office. He has gone beyond the general boundaries of political spin, and the norms of political truth telling.
BPR: Do you ever have to sacrifice being honest with your readers to avoid being called partisan?
DC: That’s the trap that Trump and his defenders want to try to set for the media. If you say he’s a liar, then you’re partisan. It doesn’t matter whether you prove these statements to be true. He says things that are contradictory, offensive, and untrue. And when you have to report on these sort of stories on almost a daily basis, it looks as if you’re being unfair to him when really what you’re doing is accurately covering him. He can mount this un-American demagogic crusade against the media claiming anything he doesn’t like is fake news. This is the way an authoritarian deals with a free press. It’s very ugly and very antithetical to the norms of our society. He’s debasing the national discourse, and this is all contributing to an increase in political divisiveness and tribalism which was already a problem.