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ANALYSIS

The madness of Donald Trump's attack on the media

Paul McGeough
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Just as Donald Trump has declared he'll hold accountable the media that attempt to hold him accountable, it follows that respect for the presidency requires respectable conduct by the president.

That said, Donald Trump has a rare capacity to look and sound ... Well, you fill in the blank: unhinged, stupid, irrational, thoughtless, obsessed and myopic. On special occasions, maybe he's all of these at the same time.

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Spicer: Trump 'doesn't own a bathrobe'

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer accused the New York Times of printing inaccuracies and said the newspaper owes President Trump an apology.

Consider: A report in The New York Times reveals that the US President seemingly signs executive orders without reading them; and, in passing, the report mentions that Trump watches TV in his bathrobe. And the only particular aspect of the story that is challenged by the Trump machine is the business of the bathrobe - spokesman Sean Spicer insists Trump doesn't own such a garment, despite an internet flood of tacky pictures of Trump wearing a bathrobe.

Consider: Trump's "get smart" solution to terrorism is to insist loudly that migrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries be barred from the US, for a time at least. But the more he bangs on, the more apparent it is that no one from these seven countries has been responsible for a single attack in the US in more than 20 years - and in the meantime, citizens of the countries that have been responsible would come and go as they please.

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Which brings us to the President's Monday outing to the US military's Central Command in Florida, at which he unveiled the third line of argument in the emerging Trump doctrine on terrorism that leaves experts in the field shaking their heads in amazement.

Firstly, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the founders and supporters of ISIS; secondly, any judge who dared to question the legality of Trump's counter-terrorism strategy would be responsible for any future attacks in the US; and now, thirdly, the news media are not reporting or are under-reporting acts of terrorism because they are in cahoots with the terrorists.

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As Joe Biden might ask, in your life have you ever heard such "malarkey?" Or as you might, or might not say - horse feathers, hogwash, piffle, flapdoodle, baloney, hooey, hokum, blarney, twaddle, poppycock, applesauce, tommyrot or bushwa. Or, if you're among friends, you might just say: "What a load of crap."

There are two issues here - what the President says and why he says it.

The "media not reporting terror" riff came into this news cycle circuitously and bizarrely - in defending Trump's migration crackdown a few days earlier, his White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway invoked as justification the "Bowling Green" massacre, which she claimed the media had failed to report - of course, the only reason the media had failed to report it was because it had never happened.

There are several schools of thought on what Trump is up to - none necessarily mutually exclusive of the others.

First, like a cushion, he reveals the impression of the last person who sat on it or talked to him - which is to say, he might have picked up the Conway imaginings and that reinforced the conspiracy theorist garbage reported by of one of his favourite websites, InfoWars.com.

You know the sort of drivel - the September 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Boston Marathon bombing were false-flag operations, orchestrated by the US government; the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a government hoax - didn't happen; and the bulk purchase of ammunition for security staff of the Social Security Administration was cover for the guards to be used to put down public unrest.

Alternately, and as often seems to be the case, Trump was cunningly attempting to manipulate the media - for days it had been obsessing on the botched drafting and roll-out of his migration crackdown and, by the simple act of dribbling this nonsense, he had pulled a good chunk of media attention to the issue at the heart of his executive order - terrorism.

Media that took the bait were running Trump's list of the kind of terrorist attacks, which Trump claims his executive order will stop. These were attacks that Trump claims were either not reported or under-reported, but the inclusion of the likes of the Orlando and San Bernardino attacks, which had wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage for weeks, supports the speculation that it's all about distracting the media from a story that's not going Trump's way.

Donald Trump claimed incidents, such as the San Bernardino attack, were underreported by the media.

US President Donald Trump claimed incidents, such as the San Bernardino attack, were under-reported by the media. Photo: KNBC

But drill down, dear reader. There is sufficient evidence on the public record now for us to appreciate that Donald Trump loves Donald Trump very much, and that this love can only be expressed in big numbers, such as those who didn't quite make it to his inauguration.

Trump wasn't merely upset; he was infuriated by media reports that his inauguration crowd was just a fraction of that which turned out for Barack Obama in 2009; and of that which turned out for the women's protest the day after the Trump inauguration.

The President barked at the National Parks Service for tweeting images that showed the big Obama crowd side-by- side with the much lesser crowd for Trump. And Spicer made a right hash of his first outing as presidential spokesman by following Trump's order that he mount an absurd attack on the media's shameful, dishonest reporting of the Trump crowd.

Hold that thought as you read Spicer's effort to recast Trump's charge that the media are accomplices to terrorism. "He felt members of the media don't always cover some of those [terrorist] events to the extent that other events might get covered," Spicer said.

"Protests will get blown out of the water, and yet an attack or a foiled attack doesn't necessarily get the same coverage."

White House press secretary Sean Spicer pushed Trump's message on the media's reporting on terror attacks.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer pushed Trump's message on the media's reporting on terrorist attacks. Photo: AP

There you have it - by Trump's measure, the women's march was "blown out of the water" by media reports. In all that, a key objective in Trump's diatribe on Monday was to punish the press for, as he sees it, dissing him on his inauguration day.

As a former adviser to four US presidents, political analyst David Gergen has been around the traps - and he was astonished by Trump's unfounded attack on the media.

"It's beneath the dignity of the presidency," he told CNN. "I think it tears at the fabric of what holds us together as a people, when we can't trust each other, we can't trust the White House, and he's telling us we can't trust the press. This is the way democracies come unravelled."

Strangely there were no attacks in Israel on Trump's list and there was no mention either of non-Islamic attacks, such as that of the white supremacist Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

All of which prompted this in an editorial in The New York Times: "There was, in fact, a terrorist attack shortly after Mr. Trump issued his immigration order: a white supremacist, officials say, armed himself with an assault rifle and stormed a mosque in Quebec City, slaughtering six Muslims during their prayers. Mr. Trump has not said a word about that massacre - although he was quick to tell America on Twitter to 'get smart' when, a few days later, an Egyptian man wielding a knife attacked a military patrol in Paris, injuring one soldier."

Trump sees terrorism only as perpetrated by Muslims - and all Muslims are complicit.

And attacks in which the victims are Muslims don't seem to rate. Barely mentioned on the Trump list were countries most affected by terrorism from Islamist extremists.

According to the State Department, nearly three-quarters of all deaths from terrorist attacks in 2015 happened in five countries - Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria, according to the State Department. The White House list was silent on attacks in Iraq, Nigeria and Syria. And two others were cited just once - a knife attack in Pakistan in which an American citizen was wounded; and a suicide bombing in Afghanistan in which 14 Nepali security guards died.

In terms of Muslim victims, analysts suggest as many as 95 per cent are Muslims, though they caution that reports of attacks don't dwell on the beliefs of victims.

The Global Terrorism Database, as reported by the Voice of America, says most attacks, as many as 98 per cent between 2001 and 2015, were executed beyond the US and western Europe, contrary to the impression conveyed by the White House's list and the administration's rhetoric.

By the count of The Washington Post, attacks in the Middle East, Africa and Asia accounted for "nearly 50 times more deaths from terrorism than Europe and the Americas" in the 18 months from early 2015. The Post reports that 658 people were killed in 46 attacks in Europe and the Americas, compared with 28,031 deaths in 2063 attacks elsewhere in the world.

The deadliest attacks in the Post analysis were 292 killed in a suicide bombing in Baghdad, 208 killed in a tribal attack in Ethiopia and 224 killed in the bombing of a Russian aircraft - with only the airline crash getting a mention on the White House list.

There's logic in the speculation that Trump took his charge against the media from InfoWars.com - that's where he gets many of his conspiracy theories. Trump has actually been on-air with InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

Donald Trump has previously appeared on-air with InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

Donald Trump has previously appeared on-air with InfoWars founder Alex Jones. Photo: AP

In December 2015, Trump fawned over Jones: "Your reputation's amazing … I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope, and we'll be speaking a lot ... A year into office, you'll be saying, "Wow, I remember that interview. He said he was going to do it, and he did a great job."

And here's a selection of InfoWars headlines on the media and terror:

  • "FAKE NEWS: MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHITEWASHES ISLAMIC TERROR IN BERLIN: Propagandists desperate to hide the obvious" - December 20
  • "SCANDAL: MASS MEDIA COVERS UP TERRORISM TO PROTECT ISLAM" - July 29
  • "GERMANY COVERING UP TERROR PLOTS TO PROTECT MUSLIM MIGRANTS" - June 24
  • "MEDIA CAUGHT COVERING UP ISLAMIC TIES IN MUNICH ATTACK" - July 24
  • "VIDEO: TERROR IN GERMANY - THE TRUTH THEY HIDE: Mass media deception to conceal what's really happening" - July 25

Similarly, InfoWars was in on the ground-floor with other crazy stuff - the nonsense theory of millions of illegal votes; the birther conspiracy against Obama; the "lock her up" campaign against Hillary Clinton; and the Muslim masses in the US celebrating the September 11 attacks.

For a President who casts himself as the font of all truth, attacks such as those that he mounts on the courts and the media also serve to discredit or delegitimise conventional sources of truth, despite their flaws and failings. If they are knocked down as a check on the truthiness of the President, then he can get away with any load of old cobblers.

So what you have is a White House team that spent its first day in office running in circles to prove the impossible - that Trump's inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama's.

And since and before the September 11 attacks, the world's media has reported relentlessly on terrorism, with dozens of journalists dying in the process, but this White House does circles again, producing a nonsense list that it claims proves a nitwit conspiracy theory that a complicit global media is under-reporting or not reporting terrorism.

This kind of stuff can't be simply reported as "the President says … "

"We had a wonderful election, didn't we?" Trump told the military brass at Central Command. "I saw those numbers, and you liked me, and I liked you."

Seriously, has any other US president uttered such inanities?

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