For thirty-four minutes on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump, former president of the United States, current Republican nominee for that same office, and popularizer of the idea that the free press is “the enemy of the people,” held forth about his achievements in office (“the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln”); the purported deficiencies of his Democratic opponent, who he alleged had not passed the bar exam; and the “nasty” disposition of one of his interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago.
The audience in the packed Waldorf ballroom at the Chicago Hilton at various points gasped, sighed, and grumbled in response to the discussion taking place between Trump and three Black women interviewers. Word of the invitation for Trump to participate in a staged Q&A at the convention was divisive among the organization’s ranks. Karen Attiah of the Washington Post resigned her position as a co-chair of the convention in the wake of the Trump announcement. Ken Lemon, the president of NABJ, defended the decision as an opportunity to pose tough questions to the Republican nominee in service of the audiences NABJ members serve.
The organization has a tradition of inviting presidents and presidential aspirants to address the organization, but Trump had declined multiple invitations during his presidency. While in office he had also verbally attacked several Black women journalists, including April Ryan, Abby Phillip, Yamiche Alcindor, and Jemele Hill. On Wednesday he added Rachel Scott of ABC to that list, accusing her of posing her questions in a “horrible” and “hostile” manner and working for a “fake news network.” Scott was part of a trio of interviewers that also included Kadia Goba of Semafor and Harris Faulkner of Fox News.
Trump has been in the unusual position of struggling for media attention in the eleven days since Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and Kamala Harris emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee. (Harris was also invited to address the gathering, but cited a scheduling conflict and plans to do a Zoom call with NABJ members in September.) The contentious context in which the event took place ensured, even before any of the participants walked onstage an hour late, that it would not be a typical campaign stop.
Donald Trump has been a central figure in American political life for nearly a decade, yet the debate about his appearance in Chicago illustrated the extent to which the press is still grappling with the same questions that attended his emergence in 2015.
Lemon’s defense of the Trump invitation cited the standard protocols of political journalism: pose tough questions to powerful people in the interest of the public. At the outset, Scott noted, “As journalists we use opportunities like these both to inform our reporting but also to help voters understand the choices they face in a consequential and historic election year.” Yet, as Roland Martin, host of Roland Martin Unfiltered and a longtime NABJ member, noted ahead of the event: “You’re not dealing with a normal situation—this is not Bob Dole and Jack Kemp when they came to NABJ in Nashville in 1996.” It was important, he said, to recognize when a media forum is being used as a political prop.
The trade-off for this style of engagement, whether conscious or unwitting, is that a journalist’s ability to pose these questions to a figure of Trump’s temperament and mendacity in no way correlates to the likelihood of getting serious answers. Moreover, the very pursuit of this information grants him the ability to spread great volumes of disinformation. NABJ hoped to offset this final dynamic by partnering with Politifact for a live fact-check of the event. This presented a kind of platform asymmetry—Trump’s misleading commentary would be articulated in public, but corrections would be issued via social media. The irony: the theme of this convention was “Journalism Over Disinformation.”
The event, which was scheduled to start at noon, didn’t begin until 1pm. Onstage, Trump blamed an unspecified problem with NABJ’s audio equipment for the delay. But Philip Lewis, deputy editor of the Huffington Post, tweeted during the delay that the event was being held up because Trump’s people were arguing with the journalists about the terms of the real-time fact-checking.
The abbreviated discussion featured direct, mostly tough questions. Scott began by asking Trump about his history of spreading false narratives about the birthplaces of Nikki Haley and Barack Obama, attacking Black journalists, and having dinner with a known white supremacist. Goba asked him about his unflagging advocacy for greater police immunity in the face of incidents like the killing of Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman shot in her home by an Illinois police officer. Faulkner asked Trump what specifically he planned to do if reelected to the White House. He was asked about his running mate J.D. Vance’s disparaging comments about childless adults, and he was pressed on his views about abortion. En route to responding to these questions Trump falsely asserted that Vice President Kamala Harris had not identified as Black until comparatively recently and that she had not passed the bar exam before conceding that she “might have” qualified to practice law. (Harris was admitted to the California bar in 1990.)
Trump exaggerated the level of his support for historically Black colleges and universities (“they were stone-cold broke and I saved them”) and reiterated the false argument that millions of undocumented migrants are driving up crime rates and taking away “Black jobs.” With every minute of his appearance onstage, Trump generated headlines but produced very little actual information. His articulation of his support for exceptions to abortion bans in the case of rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother was significant considering the weight reproductive rights will likely carry in the coming election. But the pursuit of this fractional portion of reportable information facilitates the spread of many more statements that will require diligent corrections, contextualization, and explanation.
The event was scheduled to run for a full hour but ended abruptly after just over half the allotted time. In the ballroom after the event, Attiah pointed out the problems with this approach to covering Donald Trump: “He steamrolls over this format every single time. And the lies are almost impossible to keep up with by design.” Kevin Merida, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, was present for the discussion and pointed to the need for journalists to engage with public figures: “I do think it’s good to bring newsmakers to our convention. I think that’s the right thing.” But he conceded that Trump presented particular challenges that require journalists to fine-tune how we approach him. Alcindor, of NBC News, who sat near the front of the room during the event, noted that Trump had succeeded simply by walking in. He’d wrested the spotlight away from his rival, drawn attention to his presence in Chicago and her absence, and galvanized an audience, albeit not necessarily the one gathered on the second floor of the Hilton. None of this is necessarily novel. Political figures have always engaged with the press in self-interested ways. The calculation for journalists, however, is the line at which that self-interest represents an unacceptable conflict with our own professional mandates. The forum at NABJ was combative, at points ridiculous, and, in the aftermath, just as divisive as it had been beforehand. It was, in other words, exactly what we should have expected.
Jelani Cobb is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School.