By Tiana Lowe
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Once upon a time, the greatest sin journalists could
commit was to make themselves a part of the story. On Sunday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough
and Mika Brzezinski did just that, soaking up the fluorescent spotlight on the
cover of New York magazine and
dishing about their “star-crossed relationship with the president” — and, of
course, each other — in its pages.
During trying times, contentiousness between the press
and the president has often morphed into spectacle, with anchors such as Sam
Donaldson receiving flak from the public for seeming to enter the political
arena rather than report or comment on it. With the advent of social media, the
lines between reporting, commentary, analysis, and activism were blurred, and
they’ve been obliterated by the crossover of celebrity into politics. First
there was Al Franken. Now, there is Trump. Soon, there might be Senator Kid
Rock. So it makes sense that reporters will become unwittingly entangled in the
political fray. We saw as much with Megyn Kelly, who became a political
lightning rod overnight following Trump’s deeply personal attacks on her
moderation of the first Republican primary debate.
In all fairness — or depending on whether you believe
that Morning Joe’s fluffy platforming
helped him win the Republican nomination — Trump sort of started it. In his
petty, derisive, unpresidential tweet-storm last month, he attacked
Brzezinski’s appearance and Scarborough’s sanity, and immediately after the
fact, the pair responded with a measured defense in the Washington Post. They seemed to rise above the pathetic occasion
and take Trump’s bullying in stride. At first.
Earlier this month, Scarborough published a
high-and-mighty critique of the GOP, notable only for what it unwittingly
revealed about its author. No, the former Republican congressman did not object
to Trump’s denouncing John McCain for being captured in the line of duty during
the Vietnam War. He did not declare the Republican party shot when it chose
Trump as its nominee. He reached his breaking point only once the personal
became political.
The next stop on Joe and Mika’s media junket was The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, in
which the duo discussed the vicissitudes of journalism in the 24-hour news
cycle, the ethics of sourcing, and their own relationship, making a few obvious
Trump jokes along the way. At the end, Joe even got to debut a song from his
new dad-rock album!
Their New York
magazine cover, then, really shouldn’t be shocking, yet somehow, it is.
It’s not that journalists and commentators should exist
in the shadows, especially when Trump pulls them into the arena. Jake Tapper
and Megyn Kelly have both recently been featured and glamorized in monthly
magazines, but in each case they discussed their roles as journalists, not as
the leaders of an opposition or resistance movement. Mika and Joe, meanwhile,
used the opportunity to embrace their roles in the cheap soap opera of petty
palace intrigue.
“At one point, Joe sent me a Snapchat and Donald was on
top, and then he sent me another one and Melania was!” Brzezinski gushed about
her pet bunnies, not-at-all-creepily named after the president and first lady,
to Olivia Nuzzi, the magazine’s Washington correspondent. The nearly 6,000-word
cover story is rife with such anecdotes. Scarborough makes sure to get in a
plug for his album, discussing the process of writing a love song for
Brzezinski. She makes sure to flaunt her “large diamond solitaire” and play
with his hair in front of Nuzzi. They both express shock and awe that Trump
remained, well, himself as he progressed from candidate to president. Barely
half of the feature covers the pair’s dealings with the president. The rest
reads like an incredibly nuanced analysis of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
You may be one of the five Beltway or Upper West Side
residents interested in reading about Mika and Joe’s love affair or their pithy
attempts to antagonize the leader of the free world. But the rest of the nation
just sees reporters trying to be tabloid stars and picking fights with the
president. Each frivolous, mean-spirited Twitter rant from Trump gets wiped out
of the minds of skeptically centrist Americans when they see the press behaving
like Paris Hilton instead of Walter Cronkite.
Reporters have a right to stick up for themselves when
unfairly attacked, and they have a duty to cover the news with unflinching
scrutiny. Brzezinski, who covered 9/11 as a CBS correspondent, and Scarborough,
who has represented the people in the House of Representatives, should know
better. The government is made more powerful and the people are made less so
when the press loses its credibility. Given that said credibility is already at
an all-time low, cover stories like this one simply do not help matters one
bit.
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