Callum Borchers

“If you look at the president's tweet, he said very clearly, quote, 'wire tapping' — in quotes,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said during March 13's news briefing, making air quotes with his fingers to emphasize his point. “There's been substantial discussion in several reports…There's been reports in the New York Times and the BBC and other outlets about other aspects of surveillance that have occurred. The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, 'wire tapping' — that spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.” Ah, the old air-quotes defense.

According to Spicer's new argument, President Trump didn't necessarily mean wiretapping when he said “wire tapping” — and reporters should know this because he put the phrase in quotation marks. By “wire tapping,” Trump could have been referring to any one among “a whole host of surveillance types.” Obviously.

On the campaign trail, none of President Trump's rivals could — or would — match the brazenness of his attacks on the news media. Trump's rejection of basic political norms helped him win the election, but it is becoming a problem now that he is president. As other Republicans refuse to follow his lead, Trump is growing frustrated.

A recent Washington Post story claims, "A few hours after Trump had publicly defended his attorney general and said he should not recuse himself from the Russia probe, [Jeff] Sessions called a news conference to announce just that — amounting to a public rebuke of the president." The president became irritated all over again March 5, after he received little support for his unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign: "Few Republicans were defending him on the Sunday political talk shows. Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One. Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd to explain Trump’s wiretapping claim, Rubio demurred. 'Look, I didn’t make the allegation,' he said. 'I’m not the person that went out there and said it.'"

How would you like it? That's the short version of a defense offered by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Ca), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, as reporters questioned him about looking into contacts between members of President Trump's administration and Russian officials.

“Look, I'm sure some of you are in contact with the Russian Embassy,” Chairman Nunes told a group of journalists. “So be careful what you ask for here. ... Do you want us to conduct an investigation on you or other Americans because you were talking to the Russian Embassy? I just think we need to be careful.”

A journalist's contacting the Russian Embassy — presumably in the course of reporting on National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — is not even remotely comparable to what Flynn and Sessions did. It is just plain silly for Chairman Nunes to suggest that it is.

For one night, in his address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump laid down arms in his war against the media. Vice President Pence made clear the next day on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” that President Trump's tonal shift is not permanent. This was his exchange with co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough:

Brzezinski: Is the war on the media over? Are we going to hear the words “fake news” anymore or is that page turned?
Pence: Well, I think what you have in this president — and frankly all of us in the administration — is a willingness to call out the media when they play fast and loose with the facts.
Brzezinski: He called us the enemy of the people. It's pretty strong terminology.
Pence: Yeah, well, Mika, when you see some of the baseless and fabricated stories that have come out and been treated with great attention, you know, it's frustrating.
Scarborough: But, you know, “enemy of the people”? That's a Stalinist term.
Pence: Well, look —
Brzezinski: And blocking media. Are we going to see that again?
Scarborough: Was that a turning point? He's moving away from that sort of rhetoric?
Pence: I think one of the reasons why President Donald Trump was elected is because he's a fighter. The American people want a president who will fight for their future, who will fight for American jobs, fight to make America strong in the world again but also, you know, he's willing to make his case and challenge his detractors when unfair criticisms come his way.

Attacks on the press by President Trump and his aides are so frequent that they blur together. But not all attacks are the same. Some, such as the “opposition party” label applied by White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, are aimed at the entire mainstream media. Others target certain news outlets, such as the “failing” New York Times and “fake news” CNN. Still others zero in on individual journalists. What almost all of them have in common is a lack of specifics.

So, it was notable that when the Trump White House went after Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt on Feb 26, it took the unusual step of leveling a precise charge: Isenstadt, according to “one informed official” quoted by the Washington Examiner, laughed about the death of a Navy SEAL during a conversation with White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Politico fired back at what it called a “patently false characterization of the conversation.” Isenstadt declined to discuss the episode further, and the Examiner reporter who agreed to publish the claim, Paul Bedard, turned down an interview request

President Donald Trump just can't get his story straight.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he accused the news media of widespread fabrication, claiming without evidence that “they have no sources; they just make 'em up when there are none.” The charge is wholly incompatible with his assertions, at other times (or on the same day), that U.S. intelligence officials are leaking classified information to reporters — and must be ferreted out. Which is it? Are the unidentified intelligence sources cited in reports by The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and others invented by “dishonest” journalists? Or are they real people, providing real information, who need to be stopped? Both of the president's claims cannot be true.

It seems clear which one President Trump actually believes: He speaks and tweets so frequently about plugging leaks that his consternation appears genuine.

When CNN's Dylan Byers reported that counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway had been pulled off the air by the White House, his story included a familiar line: “Conway did not respond to a request for comment.” Within minutes of the report's publication, however, Conway was talking — to rival network MSNBC, claiming Byers and CNN had it wrong. Half an hour later, Conway's “might be doing TV later tonight” became is doing TV later tonight.

To review: Conway chose not to comment before CNN published its report, but in the 55 minutes afterward, she pushed back in an off-camera interview with MSNBC and announced an appearance on Fox News to further counter the idea that she had been sidelined. Byers viewed the sequence as a series of calculated maneuvers. When a journalist asks for comment on what seems sure to be an unfavorable story, do not provide one. Wait for the report to be published, then attack it as unfair or inaccurate. Maybe even act as if you didn't have a chance to tell your side of the story.

If you read the New York Times report that several of President Trump's aides and associates communicated regularly during the campaign with Russian intelligence officials, you know that Trump's rebuttal to the controversy at a news conference made little sense. That's a big “if,” however. The reality is that Trump supporters, generally speaking, don't read the Times.

When the Pew Research Center surveyed voters after the election, the Times didn't even register among Trump backers' primary news sources. The Trump base's media consumption habits — of which the president is undoubtedly aware — is the key to success for attacks on “fake news” reports by the Times and other major outlets that Trump voters disdain. If his supporters don't actually read a report, then Trump doesn't have to respond to it, really. He can respond to a version of his own invention, and his backers will be none the wiser.

[Commentary] If public relations pros don't want to be White House communications director maybe it's because President Donald Trump doesn't really want any of them to be White House communications director, either. The truth is, Trump would rather just do the job himself. Anyone who has witnessed Sean Spicer's first few weeks as White House press secretary might be reluctant to join the Trump media shop. But communications director is more of a behind-the-scenes role. It does not require the person who fills it to go through the gauntlet of the daily press briefing, which means you will not get mocked on "Saturday Night Live" and may be subject to fewer withering critiques from the President himself. The real problem is that it is hard to imagine any communications director feeling empowered to do what the gig typically entails: creating a strategic messaging plan for the White House.

Once upon a time (like, three months ago), “fake news” had a precise meaning. It referred to total fabrications — made-up stories about Donald Trump suffering a heart attack or earning the pope's endorsement — and the phrase burst into the political lexicon as Facebook and Google vowed to clean up some of the garbage that had polluted the Internet during the presidential election. Since then, conservatives — led by President Trump — have hijacked the term and sought to redefine it as, basically, any reporting they don't like.

At the extreme end of absurdity, Trump actually asserted that “any negative polls are fake news.” All but Trump's most lemming-like followers will recognize the logical fallacy of such a statement. The risk that voters, on the whole, will accept the idea that “negative equals fake” is probably very low. More insidious is the notion that a report qualifies as fake news if it requires a correction. Such an overly broad definition unfairly attaches malicious intent to the kinds of mistakes that inevitably appear in good-faith journalism.