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Street Roots •
Dec. 16-22, 2016
Street Roots •
Page 9
News
Dec. 16-22, 2016
‘More dangerous than McCarthy'
Journalist Carl Bernstein pulls no punches in assessing Trump's rise
BY ADAM SENNOTT
C O N TR IB U T IN G W RITER
n 1992, legendary journalist Carl
Bernstein blasted the media for their
obsession with celebrity, manufactured
controversy, gossip and sensationalism in
“The Idiot Culture,” his article for The
New Republic.
The front pages of newspapers across
the country had been more
focused on Donald and Ivana
Trump’s divorce than they were
on Nelson Mandela’s return to
Soweto or the re-unification of
Germany, Bernstein said.
“Good” journalists, such as
Diane Sawyer, were asking
Trump’s lover, Marla Maples, if
he was “really the best sex you
ever had?”
“To me that was as low a
point in our journalistic
evolution in the last part of the
20th century as could be
imagined,” Bernstein nbw
bemoans. “And I think I
recognized that it was only
going to get worse. In
retrospect, the piece looks .
pretty prophetic.”
More than two decades on,
Donald Trump is once again on
the front pages of newspapers
around the world in the weeks since being
elected president - in a campaign that
featured candidates Bernstein described as
“two incredible celebrities.”
Trump’s election is an “incredibly
dangerous moment” for America, said
Bernstein, whose reporting for The
Washington Post was instrumental in
uncovering the Watergate scandal that
forced President Richard Nixon’s
resignation.
Bernstein said Hillary Clinton had a
“difficult relationship with the truth,”
which ultimately sank her campaign. But
Trump, he said, is “more dangerous than
McCarthy,” because never before “did a
demagogue reach the presidency.”
Trump is not only a product of the
celebrity culture Bernstein wrote about in
the early 1990s; he’s also a master of i t
The veteran journalist described him as a
“con man whose identification as a
business person has been about his use,
manipulation and draw of media.
“He is both a self-creation and a media
creation,” he said. “But he’s the one who’s
been a genius at using the media, and
(that’s) partly because he’s shameless.”
Shortly after the Republican primaries,
Bernstein said Trump had “made monkeys
out of all of us.”
Clinton has never been comfortable with
I
Though critical
o f the media's
sensationalism,
Bernstein says
the mainstream
press isn't to
blame for the
election o f
Trump. Instead,
‘go to the voters.'
were social media, white-nationalist media
and websites such as The Drudge Report,
which defined Hillary Clinton “in grotesque
terms that have almost nothing to do with
the reality of who she was.”
Those types of sources “had a lot to do
with how this campaign evolved,”
Bernstein said.
“The power of the old configuration of
media with a few television networks and a
half-dozen newspaper organizations, now
online, hardly defines the coverage and the
media equation,” he said.
the press, even though Bernstein calls her
“the most famous person in the world.”
In Bernstein’s biography of Clinton, “A
Woman in Charge,” he wrote that Clinton
has “a fierce desire for privacy and
secrecy,” which seems to “cast a larger and
larger shadow over who she really is.”
What she serves up for public
consumption, Bernstein wrote, “is usually
elaborately prepared and relatively
soulless. That is the true shame.”
It was that fierce desire for privacy that
led Clinton to use a private email server
while she was Secretary of State, which
Bernstein called “indefensible” and said
“did endanger national security.”
The server, he said, was also
“emblematic of those questions about trust
and openness that have dogged her for
years. She couldn’t get past that.”
It also didn’t help that Bill Clinton got on
an airplane with the attorney general while
Hillary Clinton was under investigation by
the Justice Department. It “was
unthinkable what he did,” Bernstein said.
‘Versions of the truth’
Misguided media-blaming
Despite Trump’s media mastery,
Bernstein said it’s not fair to blame the
media for the outcome of the election.
“I don’t think that Donald Trump was
elected because the media did a bad job,”
he said. “I don’t buy it for a minute.”
He said there was some good journalism
produced during the election season, about
Trump and his businesses.
“What’s really interesting is that a lot of
the great reporting in the campaign was
done by a lot of the old traditional,
mainstream news organizations,” he said,
particularly by The Washington Post, The
New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal.
That doesn’t mean the mainstream
media were perfect, Bernstein said.
“Television was very late to do
investigative biographies or even
documentaries on any of the candidates in
the primaries,” he said.
“We did great in terms of having
on-camera debates with analysts and
talking heads, myself included, but not
enough early on in the formative stages of
the campaign.”
Still, the TV networks were able to pick
up and amplify the reach of stories that
were initially reported by national
newspapers.
“Television did pretty well in reporting
those aspects that were developed
primarily from the Times, the Post and the
Journal,” Bernstein said, “and building on
those accounts and giving them
prominence in their broadcasts.”
What he believes skewed the real issues
Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein is a critic o f President-elect Donald Trump’s demagoguery and disregard fo r the truth. Bernstein is
best known fo r breaking the Watergate scandal, along with colleague Bob Woodward, as a young Washington Post reporter.
Those looking to place blame on the
media for Trump’s election should “go to
the voters,” Bernstein said.
“I think there’s much too much focus on
how the media performed as opposed to
how citizens, over the last 25 or 30 years,
and especially in this campaign, have taken
and processed information,” he said. “It’s
very easy to blame the media and let the
citizens off the hook.
“Increasingly, people in this period have
become more interested in processing
information and looking for information to
uphold their point of view and reinforce
what they already believe and buttress
their already held prejudices and political
beliefs (and) religious beliefs. So that we
don’t have a citizenry interested in the best
obtainable version of the truth.”
Bernstein also cautioned against making
overgeneralizations about the outcome of
the election.
“All of these questions are very complex,
and you can’t attribute them to one
element or another,” he said.
“When you look at the picture and all of
its complexity, and if you look for
explanations based on the best obtainable
versions of the truth, then you begin to
understand how all of these things play
together in a kind of matrix that give you a
much clearer picture of not only what
happened in this election but who we are
as a country and what our problems are
and what our weaknesses are and what our
strengths are.
“So I think this election in many regards
is perhaps a pretty good indication of
where we are as a country in all kinds of
complex ways.”
Despite running a campaign “appealing
to the worst instincts of Americans in
terms of racism, xenophobia, nativism and
sexism,” Bernstein said Trump, like Bernie
Sanders, was able to connect with millions
of white working- and middle-class voters
who have become increasingly alienated
and ignored by our political system.
Many other voters saw legitimacy in
addressing the concerns of these
Americans, as well as people of color and
other marginalized groups. Clinton was
“very, very slow to recognize” the needs of
these voters, Bernstein said.
“I think that her campaign, in this
regard, was too much based on a strategy
of mobilizing Latinos, African-Americans,
women, and not remembering and
stressing enough that the Democratic
Party, historically, has been
the party of the working
class.”
Bernstein said: “She
"H e is both a sell-
misread, and those around
her misread, the electorate, creation and a
and also, she was not an
m edia creation. But
inspiring candidate. Had she he's the one who's
won, it really would have
been a genius at
been because President
nsing the
Obama ... had dragged her
m edia, and (that's)
across the finish line with
p a rtly because he's
constituencies that needed
shameless."
to turn out, but also as a
great character witness for
CARL BERNSTEJN,
J O U R N A L IS T
her.
“But it wasn’t sufficient in
the end.”
Dangerous promises
During the campaign, Bernstein called
Trump a pathological liar, a con man and
an American neofascist, not in the likes of
Hitler or Mussolini but that of 20th-century
Argentinian President Juan Perón. Now
that Trump has been elected, Bernstein
said he’s not sure which of his campaign
promises the president-elect will follow
through on.
“His campaign promises are a mix of the
horrific and (the) ugly and undemocratic,”
he said. “But also there are some campaign
promises, such as his call for huge
infrastructure spending, that address
questions long overdue that the
Republicans particularly have been keeping
from happening.”
Trump also showed “an ignorance about
our history in this country, what real
existing conditions are, such as his
characterization of black America with any
sort of recognition whatsoever of the huge
black middle class in this country,”
Bernstein said - that “black communities
were exclusively impoverished, crime
infested, not just enclaves, but blanketed in
that way... which is not the case.”
“His election is an incredibly dangerous
moment because of what he promised to
do,” he warns.
M a n Sennott is editordn-chief o f Spare
Change News, Boston. Courtesy o f Spare
Change News / INSP.ngo