Bully for Whom? Serge Kovaleski and the Trump paradox.By James Taranto
The current leader in the GOP polls gleefully flouts all of the usual rules of political and social decorum, constantly launching attacks—many of them rather offensive—against both his political rivals and members of the media he believes have treated him unfairly. . . .
Part of what’s been strange about the trajectory of the campaign so far is that Trump hasn’t been punished, in any real sense, for engaging in the sort of behavior that almost everyone agrees is terrible in any setting. Yes, each gross incident is followed by a wave of denunciations, but they don’t seem to have an impact—if anything, Trump seems to be gaining popularity by bullying.
Singal consulted with a “bullying expert,” a UCLA psychologist, who advised Trump’s Republican rivals to counter his bullying by ganging up against him.
“As of yet,” Singal observed, “that united force hasn’t quite emerged in the GOP primary.” As of now, however, it does seem to have emerged in the media, thanks to a dust-up between Trump and a reporter named Serge Kovaleski.
In 2001, Kovaleski was working for the Washington Post. On Sept. 18 of that year, he shared a byline on a story titled “Northern New Jersey Draws Probers’ Eyes.” The story noted that Jersey City had been the base of operations for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who directed several terrorist attacks and conspiracies, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “Law enforcement officials said northeastern New Jersey could be potentially fertile ground” in investigating the 9/11 attacks, the Post reported. The story included this tidbit:
In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.
Trump tweeted that passage Monday, commenting “I want an apology! Many people have tweeted that I am right!” The Post’s Glenn Kessler, who had overlooked the Kovaleski piece in his Sunday “fact check” of what he called Trump’s “outrageous” claim, added an update:
The reporters who wrote the story do not recall whether the allegations were ever confirmed. “I certainly do not remember anyone saying that thousands or even hundreds of people were celebrating,” said Serge Kovaleski, one of the reporters. “That was not the case, as best as I can remember.”
Fredrick Kunkle, the other reporter, added: “I specifically visited the Jersey City building and neighborhood where the celebrations were purported to have happened. But I could never verify that report.”
Trump responded in a Tuesday speech in South Carolina, described by Politico:
Citing a 2001 article written by Kovaleski that referred to people allegedly seen celebrating the attacks, Trump said it was “Written by a nice reporter.”
Trump went on, “Now the poor guy—you ought to see the guy: ‘Uhh I don’t know what I said. I don’t remember.’ He’s going, ‘I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what I said.’ ” As he spoke, Trump launched into an impression which involved gyrating his arms wildly and imitating the unusual angle at which Kovaleski’s hand sometimes rests.
Kovaleski is afflicted with arthrogryposis, a congenital joint disease that causes the hooking of his hands. Kovaleski’s current employer, the New York Times, said in a statement: “We think it’s outrageous that he would ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters.”
Trump answered with a pair of statements of his own. One of them demanded “an apology from the failing New York Times”:
In fact, Mr. Trump does not know anything about the reporter or anything about what he looks like.
He was merely mocking the fact that the reporter was trying to pull away from a story that he wrote 14 years ago.
Mr. Trump stated, “Serge Kovaleski must think a lot of himself if he thinks I remember him from decades ago—if I ever met him at all, which I doubt I did. He should stop using his disability to grandstand and get back to reporting for a paper that is rapidly going down the tubes.”
On the facts in evidence, this columnist must side with Kovaleski and against Trump.
For one thing, Kovaleski’s lapse of memory seems believable. The article was written a long time ago, when lots was going on. The reference to celebrations was a single paragraph in a complicated story. Evidently it was his co-author who looked into the rumor, and he did not find evidence to substantiate it. To be sure, the story speaks for itself, and it backs up Trump to a small degree. But there is no reason to suspect Kovaleski of bad faith in saying he doesn’t remember anything more that would vindicate Trump’s tale.
Trump claims to have “one of the all-time great memories”; if so, he ought to have remembered Kovaleski given this, reported by the Times:
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Kovaleski said that he met with Mr. Trump repeatedly when he was a reporter for The [New York] Daily News covering the developer’s business career in the late 1980s, before joining The [Washington] Post. “Donald and I were on a first-name basis for years,” Mr. Kovaleski said. “I’ve interviewed him in his office,” he added. “I’ve talked to him at press conferences. All in all, I would say around a dozen times, I’ve interacted with him as a reporter while I was at The Daily News.”
Video of the Trump appearance is available from Reuters, among many other sources. It appears to us far likelier that the similarity between the candidate’s gesticulations and the reporter’s infirmity was mockery than pure coincidence.
To judge from our Twitter feed, which includes a good number of conservative journalists, that’s the media consensus across ideological lines. One suspects that, as has often happened before, Trump’s supporters will see the matter differently. Which brings us to the Trump paradox: How can his supporters and his detractors see the same behavior in such drastically different lights?
We noted another example on Tuesday. Trump’s account of having witnessed thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey appears to be inaccurate, whether an honest error of recollection or a deliberate deception. But it challenges the official lie that, as told by Hillary Clinton, Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Thus Trump’s supporters see him as a truth-teller even when he isn’t telling the truth.
Evidence for this comes from a report on a South Carolina Trump rally by the Atlantic’s Molly Ball:
“I remember seeing Muslims around the world celebrating after 9/11,” says Chip Matthews, a 63-year-old retired carpentry teacher in glasses with tinted lenses. So what if it was the Mideast and not New Jersey? “The basic point, I think, is true,” he says.
His dispute with Kovaleski is another example of the paradox. Yes, Trump is acting the bully, picking on a disabled guy, or, as the Times puts it, ridiculing his appearance. But his supporters are likely to see it not as bullying a man but as standing up to a powerful institution—the New York Times, or the liberal media more generally. To use a dreadful expression favored by the Angry Left, Trump is either punching down or punching up, depending on just whom or what you think he’s punching.
And media types are not above the sort of bullying they find so abhorrent when Trump does it. Consider this passage from Ball’s report (hat tip: the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross):
“I have got my mind made up, pretty much so,” says Michael Barnhill, a 67-year-old factory supervisor with a leathery complexion and yellow teeth. “The fact is, politicians have not done anything for our country in a lot of years.”
Michael Barnhill is an ordinary citizen taking part in politics. Unlike Serge Kovaleski, he does not have the benefit of spokesmen to express institutional outrage when somebody publicly ridicules his appearance.
Ball’s nasty treatment of Barnhill, of course, does not excuse the ugly aspects of Trump’s behavior. But it does help demonstrate why Trump and his supporters—as well as conservatives who don’t care for Trump—often feel put upon by the media. Recall that it was Kovaleski’s employer, the Times, that in 2011 led the effort to blame the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on conservatives, even after it was clear that the assailant had no discernible political motive.
Our argument is that media bias is helping to feed the Trump campaign. The converse is also true. Some journalists argue the campaign demonstrates the need for more bias. Here’s Fortune’s Mathew Ingram:
Another factor is the traditional media approach of emphasizing objectivity and artificial balance in news coverage—what James Carey at Columbia University calls “false equivalency” and New York University professor Jay Rosen refers to as “the View from Nowhere.” As media researcher Nikki Usher put it in a recent Medium post:
“The reporting is detached rather than a full-fledged and necessary assault on some of the worst racism we’ve ever heard from a national political figure. Trump is just making things up and no one is actually calling him on it directly in the name of objective reporting.” . . .
Are news outlets so concerned about being seen as partisan that they don’t want to challenge such statements directly? If so, that’s yet another strike against the false objectivity standard.
If you think journalistic objectivity is a mere pretense, then there’s really no case to be made for it. Open partisanship is better—more honest—than partisanship that pretends to be above the fray.
But we’re old-school enough to see it differently. Perfect objectivity is an unattainable goal, but objectivity is a worthy aspiration, its pursuit a discipline that makes for better journalism. It is the source of whatever authority journalists still enjoy. In tempting them toward open partisanship, Trump may pose a greater threat to the media than the media pose to Trump.
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