As President Donald Trump took the oath of office, he took over a country deeply divided. Trump is filling his cabinet with extremely wealthy and strictly conservative private sector individuals (for the most part). The media coverage has been harsh at best. Here are some of the takeaways I got from reading some news articles.
The New York Times reported that Steven Mnuchin, the nominee for Treasury Secretary, failed to disclose almost $100 million in assets held in the Cayman Islands. How could this be? That is surely not “draining the swamp.”
How could Governor Nikki Haley, a person with zero foreign policy experience, be nominated to be the U.N. ambassador? That is not putting the best people in charge — that’s putting party favoritism at the forefront.
The criticism of Haley is justified, but less so for Mnuchin. The headline for The New York Times article about Mnuchin is “Steven Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary, Failed to Disclose $100 Million in assets.” However, it isn’t until a few paragraphs in that the reader learns that the $100 million wasn’t his own money and that he claims it was based on a misunderstanding with the questionnaire. Before those facts are revealed, the article quotes a Democratic senator criticizing Mnuchin. Even though I am deeply skeptical about Mnuchin, this news article still reeks of bias.
However, this is not to say that the news coverage is totally unfair. Ben Carson is the nominee of the secretary of Housing and Urban Development department. This is not normal and should be scrutinized because he has no qualifications to run HUD. Carson himself essentially admitted that.
“Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience; he’s never run a federal agency,” said Armstrong Williams, a top Carson adviser, in an article from the Los Angeles Times.
It is one thing to have someone with no government experience head a department, like Rex Tillerson, but it is a whole different ball field when a person has no private or public experience in the department he will be running. Critics may argue that Carson grew up in subsidized housing so he has personal experience with HUD policies. Does that mean that I am qualified to be Secretary of Education because I receive Federal Stafford loans? The logic is absent.
The problem with this kind of news coverage is that it promotes quick anger about the subject manner and just leads to some different outrage a couple of days later. At this point, who is even thinking about John Lewis’ comments about Trump’s legitimacy as a president? However, cabinet appointments matter a lot more because they hold a great deal of power in enforcing the law and enacting policies.
What is more important, Mnuchin being accused of running a “foreclosure machine,” or Scott Pruitt’s plans to enforce regulations if confirmed to be the Environmental Protection Agency administrator? Rationally, it would be the latter, but the former gets a lot more headlines.
Newspapers, cable news shows and broadcast television have been allowing partisans to drive the news cycles, but it is too dangerous to our liberal democracy to allow this. Politicians will make every news cycle about attacking their opponents, not discussing policy.
Kellyanne Conway said after the election that “there’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you.” She was making the argument that Trump was speaking to people’s anxieties rather than telling them how racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. the other candidate is. She is right, sadly.
The press needs to focus on the hours of testimony by the Trump cabinet nominees and hold them to it. Showing bias isn’t the way to do it. Bombarding the public with facts, complete and unbiased, is.
