The White House has revoked the press pass of Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, after a testy exchange between the reporter and President Trump at a news conference on Wednesday
When a White House press aide—a young woman—attempted to retrieve the microphone from Acosta, a light skirmish ensued, and was captured on film.
The White House called Acosta’s exchange with the aide an inappropriate physical contact.
Photographs and moving images have long been thought to record the world as it actually appears, capturing a scene or an event dispassionately and without bias. Unlike painting or writing, the photograph and the cinema camera are thought to have a special relationship to actual fact: They appear able to point at reality and capture it in an evidentiary way.
That capacity has come under fire in recent years. Thanks to machine-learning techniques, it has become possible to digitally manipulate video to construct new footage that never really took place. These “deepfakes,” as they are sometimes called, pose a threat to the trustworthiness of film.
Lens-based media are media of perspective. Whether or not the pretzeling of arms was “doctored” by Infowars, and whether or not it was knowingly disseminated in its manipulated fashion by Sanders, the video itself never captured “truth” anyway; it recorded a sequence of events in space at a moment in time, offering them as raw material for interpretive effort.
The GOP’s mastery of language for politics began in the 1990s, when the political strategist Frank Luntz started conducting polling and research for conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. Luntz was instrumental in Gingrich’s steamrolling of Congress, having helped author the Contract for America’s aggressive Newtspeak, which used previously off-the-table terms like sick, corrupt, and traitor to describe Democrats.
Luntz soon became the craftsman of specialized language for the GOP. For example, he urged his clients to use the phrase “climate change” instead of “global warming,” and “death tax” instead of “estate tax” on behalf of the Republicans. Their purpose was to change the emotional content of issues. Global warming sounds threatening, but climate change? Some change can be good, after all. An estate tax sounds like it’s for the wealthy (which it is), but a death tax sounds like it penalizes everyone. Luntz’s terms remain powerful and effective even today—climate scientists now embrace the toothless term climate change even as it undercuts the threat of global warming.
You can see this same kind of thing in today’s political discourse. Take “fake news.” It takes a real threat that existed thanks to the internet—websites and Facebook accounts posing as news outlets in order to spread propaganda—and recasts it upon actual, non-fake news organizations whom the president or the administration doesn’t like. Trump parried Acosta’s invocation of the “invasion” with a “fake news” accusation during the press conference. But the press just leaned into it. Defending Acosta against Sanders, CNN vice president Matt Dornic called the supposedly doctored video of the incident “actual fake news.” His attempt to undermine the White House by calling them out for hypocrisy only reinforced the term’s connection to CNN. The statement played right into Trump’s hands.
CNN accused the White House of having done so “in retaliation for his challenging questions at today’s press conference.” It’s clear that Trump does want Acosta, CNN, and the press in general out of his business. That desire, and this act in service of it, is chilling. But focusing on those matters alone ignores another victory for Republican rhetoric: the White House’s clever, if ignoble, contortion of a #MeToo-style intervention as justification for revoking Acosta’s press access.
Acosta fell into the trap when he tried to defend himself against Sanders: “This is a lie,” he posted on Twitter, in response to the claim that he had “placed his hands on a woman” during the encounter. Acosta can’t really deny that he came into physical contact with the White House press aide. He could observe that the contact was initiated by her, not him, to put an end to his questioning. But that’s a losing move too: It casts a woman in a powerless position as an instigator of aggression, when she was simply trying to do her job. He could invoke his own right to offer an interpretation of the incident, but as a white man in his own position of authority— the chief White House correspondent for CNN—doing so also risks unseemliness. Acosta has no good options.
The same is true for his profession by extension. To journalists, Acosta’s attempt to keep hold of the microphone looks like good reporting—an attempt to press a man in power for satisfactory answers to reasonable questions. That’s what NBC News White House correspondent Jim Alexander seems to have celebrated when, after receiving the mic after Acosta, he defended the latter as a “diligent reporter who busts his butt like the rest of us.” But the same scrappiness that reporters celebrate as a virtue of their profession, and their civic duty, can seem like aggression and disrespect to some of the very citizens that reporters hope to serve.
— source theatlantic.com | Ian Bogost | Nov 9, 2018