Trump and the Press: Frank Sesno on the State of Journalism

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: So, with the Trump administration exerting huge pressure on the media, the New York Times editorial board accused it of, quote, “distorted view,” whereby it’s banning words, phrases, and ideas in favor of its own version of free speech. Former CNN Washington bureau chief and journalism professor Frank Sesno fears that unless news organizations hold all power to account, the end result may very well be what he calls a propaganda service. And he’s joining Michel Martin now to discuss this worrying trajectory.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Frank Sesno, thank you so much for joining us.

FRANK SESNO, PROFESSOR, GW SCHOOL OF MEDIA AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS: It’s a pleasure.

MARTIN: You and I were actually at the White House together. So, if you wouldn’t mind, explain to people what the White House Press Corps does.

SESNO: White House Press Corps covers the President of the United States, those who meet with him, where the president goes, changes in policy, and the politics that surround the policy, and vice versa, that takes place there every single day. There’s a press briefing room, that’s where the White House Press Corps sits when there’s a briefing. Some have offices there, those who are there on a regular basis. And then there’s the pool, which you’ve heard so much about, smaller groups that come out of the larger White House Press Corps to cover the president, to be present in smaller spaces, whether it’s the Oval Office or Air Force One.

MARTIN: But the pool itself, could you just explain why there is a pool?

SESNO: There is a pool because there are so many times when the president is going someplace or holding an event in a smaller space where the White House Press Corps, a hundred plus people, couldn’t possibly fit. So, traditionally, the pool has represented members from the press corps, a photographer, a videographer, somebody who’s shooting video, a print reporter, somebody from the wire service, that was the Associated Press, to capture those events and report back to the larger White House Press so that they can then take the details, the color, the particulars from that event and report it to their communities, to their audiences. The White House press pool is gigantically important. I did that many times when I was covering the White House, when I was on Air Force One, there were a handful of us and you were there just in case something happened.

MARTIN: So, just to be clear, this is not a privilege, it’s a responsibility.

SESNO: Oh, my gosh, yes.

MARTIN: I mean, it’s a privilege in a sense that it’s a privilege to your colleagues, but it’s a responsibility. You’re not just working for your news organization in the pool, you’re working for all news organizations, and you have a duty to all the news organizations to recount what has transpired fairly accurately so that they can do their jobs. So, why are we talking about this? We’re talking about this because a couple of weeks ago, the Trump White House banned the Associated Press from participating in the pool, the press pool, or even traveling on Air Force One, because they are angry that the A.P. continues to refer to the body of water that has been known as the Gulf of Mexico, just south of the U.S., President Trump decided it should be called the Gulf of America. The A.P. is an international organization. It has clients all over the world. It serves news organizations elsewhere. So, it said it would continue to use the Gulf of Mexico. And also say, you know, in the United States, the Gulf of America is sort of also known as. The Trump administration decided that they didn’t like that and they’re punishing them by restricting them as a result. I do think it’s worth noting that even conservative news outlets like Fox, Fox News, and Newsmax objected to this. What do you think of that? What do you make of it?

SESNO: Well, I think it’s very significant that Fox and Newsmax and some 40 news organizations have written to the White House saying the A.P. should be allowed back in, and this is a serious infringement on a free press and the First Amendment freedom of speech. I think it’s important for people to understand, first and foremost, the Associated Press, and I work for the Associated Press, has a rigorous program and policy of how it uses terminology and language. So, for example, the term terrorist, the term war, the term, you know, if you say a politician is lying, the A.P. has standards and it’s — and they’re very thoughtful standards. Similarly, on renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, they had — they applied their standards, their policy, and they decided that they were going to stick with the Gulf of Mexico, although acknowledging that, you know, also known as, or however they were, characterizing Gulf of America. The idea that the White House would say, not only do we reject your language and your policy, but now, we will punish you and we will keep you out of events that you have covered for decades and keep you out of the pool. And by the way, the Associated Press has been a pillar of the pool because they’re a wire service. They’re not a newspaper or another publication that often is considered to have an editorial page or an opinion or anything like that. This is very serious. And it does raise serious questions about punishment for — and censorship for language used or stories that the White House simply doesn’t like. And that’s what’s very concerning. Concerning both in terms of the punishment and concerning in terms of the chilling effect, which is, I think, what the White House wants, actually, to send to every news organization that might publish a story that the White House doesn’t like.

MARTIN: The A.P. has since launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Soon after the ban on the Associated Press, the White House announced its officials would determine which outlets could participate in the press pool. And the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that — she framed the decision to take control of access to the press pool as saying that, quote, “a select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly over the privilege of press access at the White House.” What do you say to that?

SESNO: Well, I definitely think that there can be more voices brought to the White House and to other beats. I have no particular problem with — if you’re bringing some of those voices and they’re influencers or opinion leaders or their podcasters, if they want to have that access, although it’s a very limited space. In the past, the standard has been, are you covering this place journalistically? I think it’s important to draw a distinction, and I’m doing this increasingly now, of understanding what is the difference between a journalistic organization, a news organization, as we call it, and a media enterprise. A media enterprise can be anybody with a microphone or a camera. They may or may not be obliged to tell the truth or to seek the truth or to represent multiple sides or to have sources that can be identified whether by name or on background, as often it takes — is the case, versus news organizations that have been traditionally those who had that front seat at the White House, which are going to mainstream and major audiences. And that includes Fox News, NBC, you know, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, conservative and whatever on in their opinion sections. But fundamentally doing journalism in the way they present the news. Now, plenty of people will disagree with that, and there’s a good place for an argument. But my concern is by bringing in news organizations that do — or media organizations that are not news organizations, that are not there to seek truth, to cite sources, to hold all power to account that we then end up with a propaganda service, and that’s what I worry about.

MARTIN: This administration has been no — they’ve made no secret of the fact that they are very aggressively going after news organizations that they deem to be propaganda organizations for ideologies other than their own. I mean, I don’t know that they use the word propaganda, but that’s the implication of it, that these news organizations, these legacy media organizations are not in alignment with their views, and therefore, they are applying extra scrutiny to them. For example, the Department of Defense has announced that The New York Times, NBC News, NPR, and Politico offices at the Pentagon are going to be replaced by conservative outlets like Breitbart, OAN, The New York Post. And then, Brendan Carr, the new chair of the FCC, has launched investigations into media companies that Trump has had disagreements with ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and NPR. And Carr has also opened an inquiry into Comcast, the owner of NBC Universal. And of course, in the spirit of full disclosure, I think it’s not exactly a secret that I have a relationship with both NPR and PBS. We’re speaking on a PBS outlet now. And also, there was a congressional inquiry into what — you know, what they consider to be sort of bias at these organizations. How do you assess that?

SESNO: I find this very concerning. I mean, look, there are plenty of places where you can pick at the coverage that a particular news organization has pursued on a story, and that it takes a point of view, or that it’s over the top, or it’s sensational, whatever. But across the board, to paint with this big brush, to do what’s being done is actually doing what many conservatives have said they’ve been suffering from all along, which is, you know, a cancel culture. This is actually a cancel and prosecute culture. And I’m very worried about that. I think, again, it’s so important for people to understand that what a news organization is meant to do, and this is enshrined in ethical standards and practices that most of them have, and it comes from the society of professional journalists and elsewhere, they seek the truth, they provide context, they correct errors, and they hold power to account. And what is essentially happening here is the Trump administration saying, if you do a story that we don’t like, you’re — we’re going to shove you on the House. We’re going to push you out of the press room, out of your traditional space. It’s not about just a bias, I think, that could be documented clearly, it’s about stories that they don’t like. And there are ample examples of this. I think there’s something else to recognize. This is not happening in a vacuum. Shortly after the terrible plane crash here in Washington, the NTSB said, we’re not going to do press conferences and issue press releases anymore. We’re going to put out statements on X. The idea of taking questions, of being accountable, of providing real-time information is not just about your relationship with the press, it’s about the relationship with the public, being accessible, being accountable, and taking tough questions at tough times. And that includes stories that are not complimentary, because that’s what happens. Reality happens. You know, Michel, you and I were at the White House a long time ago, and I remember a press secretary under President Reagan who said, tell you what, you don’t tell me how to manage the news, I won’t tell you how to report the news. And that was a recognition that there is an adversarial relationship built in to this relationship between the press and the government, at any level. When I was bureau chief at CNN, I had ample calls from the White House press secretary and others who screamed at me, who said, we don’t like the story, the way you’ve done it is unfair and we would have a dialogue, and sometimes we stood our ground and sometimes we made a change, but that is a very different kind of relationship than the one we’ve got now where the government is using levers of power and threat to intimidate and to change the editorial nature of the reporting coming from professional journalists.

MARTIN: Well, a couple questions about this. For one, you know, the president has achieved some successes in his personal legal battles against news organizations. I mean, you know, in December, ABC agreed to pay $15 million to settle this defamation suit over one word uttered by anchor George Stephanopoulos. CBS seems to be poised to settle a lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his political opponent — then political opponent Kamala Harris, because they used a soundbite from one part of the interview to promote it on one platform and then a different quote in another platform, both part of the same interview. I mean, listen, you know, I’m hearing from my neighbors and who are saying, you know, what is this? You know, the media is rolling over. So, why should we pay attention to you? Why should we listen to this? Why should we read your outlet? Why should we watch your news?

SESNO: Good questions. Look, I think that it’s important to say at the outset that news organizations should also be held accountable for what they do. I mean, if they’re in the business of holding power to account, they should be held to account. And there are plenty of instances where the media, news organizations, journalists have gotten the story wrong, have conveyed it in a lopsided way have done false equivalencies or whatever else. So, call them out for it. And where it’s really serious, go for it. I served as the expert journalism witness in the Dominion Voting Systems versus Fox News lawsuit. It did not actually go to trial because Fox settled for nearly — for more than three quarters of a billion dollars. But there were standards there, right? Defamation in that particular case was deliberate, a willful disregard for the truth. Could you have proven at trial that there was a willful disregard for the truth? And the answer is yes, which is one of the reasons why they settled. What’s going on with CBS and ABC does not seem — one word in a live interview or something like that, does that reach that level of a willful disregard for the truth? And I think there are those who would say, well, yes, it does. And have that conversation. I think the threshold is considerably lower in these cases. I don’t think they reach that threshold. And so, these corporations have settled to make the issue go away. That’s what Fox did too, by the way. They settled to make it go away. So, it didn’t go to trial. We can have a conversation and should about the accountability of media and journalism and what they report, but there is a very important and fine line between that defamation notion and free speech, and we need to be mindful of where that gets set, because if we go too far one way or the other, then we endanger free speech. And that, I think, is what is happening.

MARTIN: But to that end, that whole question of trust, you know, trust in the media continues to decline. According to a Gallup poll in the fall, only 31 percent of Americans expressed confidence in the media to report the news, quote, “fully, accurately, and fairly,” unquote. So, why is that? I mean, what’s your take on that? Why is trust in the media falling as precipitously as it seems to be?

SESNO: Well, in many cases, the media have brought it on. They have come – – this is separate from what the Trump administration is doing, but let’s talk about media, which is part of what’s invited a lot of. Too many in the media have gone for clicks and ratings rather than content. Too much, we see, opinion and fact mixed, so the audience becomes confused. Cable television, where I come from, has become opinion central, where it’s mostly combat, and there’s not nearly enough real storytelling and journalism. There’s some, and it’s and some of it is quite good, but there are also times when there’s not. So, the media need to do a hard look at themselves too, and they are, but they need to do more of it, and accept their share of responsibility for why trust has declined and what they can do to address that and regain trust, which I think revolves largely around transparency. Why do we pick the stories we do? Why do we cover them in the way we do? Who are the sources that we’re talking about? Why are they anonymous? There have been efforts in the media, in news organizations, to convey some of that to the public, but much more needs to be done.

MARTIN: So, given what you said, somebody’s listening to this conversation and says, you know what, I have issues with the media. Why should they care?

SESNO: Why should they care? Because for all the flaws that are out there, professional news organizations actually are accountable or should be accountable and generally are for where they make mistakes. They correct errors or should. They are subject to public pressure because they’re part of a community. This is especially the case in local and regional news organizations where they are neighbors with the people they cover. Because they do have rules, identifying sources, correcting errors, providing context, updating stories with new information. There actually are those rules. And here’s the thing. OK. Let me give another example. We put media a lot in the political national context. You have a local news organization. The reporter there gets wind that somebody down at the supermarket — at the grocery store is coloring the meat so that the meat can be sold past its sell by date and maybe it isn’t good. Do you want that story reported if that story comes from somebody behind the meat counter who’s leaking to the media? Do you want to know about that? Of course, you do. Now, if that news organization makes a mistake on the high school football score, that’s a problem and that’s an issue. But do you shut the news organization down and then not have that story about what’s happening at the local grocery store? There are many, many things to consider here. I don’t mean to muddy the waters, but life is complicated. And fundamentally, what professional journalism is supposed to do is tell this story and seek the truth. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t make mistakes, but to throw that baby out with the bath water is going to deprive citizens of the vehicles that are supposed to bring them information about their communities and their lives so they could be more engaged citizens, voters and neighbors.

MARTIN: Frank Sesno, thanks so much for talking with us.

SESNO: It’s been a pleasure. I wish you well.