The Weekly Screed (#786)

“CHIRP!”
by David Benjamin

“The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
                                           — Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne)

PARIS — When the press acquiesced to being called “the media,” the door closed on Finley Peter Dunne and opened wide for Billy Bush.

Marshall McLuhan introduced the term “medium” to the public discourse when I was just a kid. McLuhan’s focus was on television and its power to mold an intended message to fit the medium that carries the message.” The medium,” he wrote, in one of the 20th century’s most resonant sentences, “is the message.” It wasn’t long before every means of informing, enlightening, amusing and misleading the mass audience came to be bundled under McLuhan’s formulation, “media.”

In Shakespeare’s formulation, “Ay, there’s the rub.”

As an adjective, “medium” means middling, average, bland and muted. In science, a medium is a neutral substance, ideally sterile — agar agar in a Petri dish — wherein viruses, bacteria, microbes and pestilences are welcome to flourish under glass, having no effect on anything or anyone in their vicinity, or on earth.

A journalist who accepts his or her designation as “medium” deserves to be regarded as yellow jelly in a little round saucer.

The word “press,” however, connotes a lot more pizzazz. Simply by saying, “I’m the press,” you let your subject know he’s going to be leaned on. “Press”is the first syllable in “pressure.” It’s expressive, impressive, even oppressive and it can be depressing, especially if the news is about a natural disaster, the death of a hero or the rise of a tyrant. Anyone with a “PRESS” card stuck in his hatband has a heavy verb to live up to.

When reporters became the media, the pressure was off. Afflicting the comfortable is not a medium thing to do.

In a way, Billy Bush’s now-infamous fratfest with Donald Trump in 2005 — which suddenly turned the words “tits” and “pussy” into acceptable usage in family newspapers (but not on network TV)  — is a poor example of the decline from the adversary press to the supine media. Clearly, Billy Bush — a celebrity toady with kindergarten credulity — hardly merits description as a journalist.

On the other hand, Billy Bush — riding the bus with Trump, bonding over adultery, bantering about women’s genitals and sharing the unbearable horniness of being — was clutching the Holy Grail of the post-press media. Billy had access! Billy was side-by-side with a big-name, A-list celebrity. He was being treated like a buddy by one of the most well-known gasbags on earth. They were talkin’ dirty together. They were leering four-eyed through the window at a gorgeous babe who was waiting for them and they were both picturing themselves taking turns on the bitch.

Who would want to ruin a moment so sublime? What self-respecting member of the access-addicted media would spoil this special camaraderie by asking, say, “Have you really used your money and power to sexually assault unwilling women, big boy?”

Or, “Golly, sir, does your pregnant wife know that you think of her as just another piece of ass?”

Access — also known as “brown-nosing” — is a fragile, capricious indulgence. Abuse it, even slightly, ask a question with the faintest whiff of snark and — bam! — you’re off the bus, Bill.

Like Billy Bush, Matt Lauer is not a journalist. He just plays one on TV. He tried earnestly to pull a Mike Wallace during an NBC forum last month with Hillary Clinton and Trump. Lauer had access in spades. He used it to grill Clinton about e-mails and then scolded her when she spoke slightly too long on matters of policy. He abandoned this bulldog pose with Trump. He tossed softballs and allowed Trump to ramble off-topic, dodge questions and regurgitate a barrage of tired talking points, many of which were barefaced lies. Lauer challenged little and chided not. Finally, having prodded Hillary to wrap it up, Lauer ended his Trump exchange with time to spare. He gave up.

The real press, as its name suggests, never gives up.

Why, though, did Lauer feel comfortable pressing Clinton, only to change gears and soft-soap Trump? The difference lies, again, in the nature of the “media” as we now know them.

The news itself is a medium under siege from other media.

Donald Trump is the apotheosis of Twitter. He’s the 200-pound canary in the old joke. He has no respect for the traditional press, nor does he feel any reverence for the standards of ethics, education, accuracy and fairness that the press has haltingly evolved throughout its tortuous history. Trump gets his “news” online, from a mishmash of aggregators, bloggers, propagandists, tweeters, flamers, paranoids, hermits, trolls and crackpots, who worship him in turn. On social media, Donald Trump is — like Matt Drudge and InfoWars — a voice of strident authority.

The term that best captures the nature and the appeal of social-media platforms where the Trumps and Kardashians roam free is “follower.” Once, newspapers had “subscribers,” reporters had readers. Now, in cyberspace, Donald Trump has followers.

Disparage their prophet and you trigger a firestorm from Trump’s million-maniac faithful. Ridicule Trump and you find yourself drowning in a swamp of anonymous vitriol so vile that you re-think your mother’s assurance that “names will never hurt me.”

When Matt Lauer prudently handled Trump with kid gloves, he was smelling that swamp. He understood the damage that Trump’s followers, in their immense and   relentless rage, could do to his standing in the media as well as to NBC. Hillary Clinton, whose “followers” are fewer and less incendiary, posed no such peril.

That night on TV, only one person, Donald Trump, was the biggest star in politics. So Lauer did his duty. He coddled the diva. He preserved his network’s access and, with it, the ad dollars that accrue to the wretched media chore of sucking up, kissing ass and licking spittle.

Mr. Dooley is rolling in his grave.