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And Thank You For Watching
Extraordinary Stories from a Veteran News Journalist
Mark Austin
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eBook - ePub
And Thank You For Watching
Extraordinary Stories from a Veteran News Journalist
Mark Austin
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'This insightful and superb book takes you to World Cups, to conflicts in war-torn countries, to division in Trump's America... A terrific read.' - Gary Lineker For over thirty years, Mark Austin has covered the biggest stories in the world for ITN and Sky News. As a foreign correspondent and anchorman he has witnessed first-hand some of the most significant events of our times, including the Iraq War, the historic transition in South Africa from the brutality of apartheid to democracy, the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, and natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake and the Mozambique floods.
Full of high drama, raw emotion and the sometimes hilarious happenings from the life of a veteran reporter, Mark Austin's memoir gives startling insight into the stories behind the headlines. 'A must read.' - Sir Trevor McDonald
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TRUMPTOWN
NO ONE SAW it coming. No one. No one, that is, except a rock band called Rage Against The Machine. In 2000, while shooting a video on Wall Street, they forced the New York Stock Exchange to close early. At one point in the finished video, you see an onlooker holding up a sign proclaiming âDonald J. Trump for Presidentâ. Protest and prescience⌠quite some performance. In truth, it probably had more to do with the director of the video, Michael Moore.
âI think it was either Michael Mooreâs idea or one of his staffers,â Rage guitarist Tom Morello told a New York newspaper. âIt wasnât a warning, it was just meant to be a joke â pure humour. But it turned out to be Nostradamus-like.â
If it was Moore, a well-known leftwing filmmaker and activist, then hats off to him. But even he canât have meant it seriously. Not sixteen years before the event. Much later he did predict that Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And he went on the following year to foresee his eventual victory. In a now-celebrated blog he said: âThis wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, âcause youâll be saying them for the next four years: âPRESIDENT TRUMP.ââ
And, of course, that is exactly what the world is saying: President Trump. And the world is getting used to it. President Trump⌠it trips off the tongue like you never thought it would.
Michael Moore â whose political bias against Trump is self-evident â may choke when he says those words, but he saw it on the horizon, he saw what was happening in America and elsewhere; he saw the new politics that was unfolding.
Most of the rest of us didnât. Certainly I didnât, and neither did others supposedly more in tune than me with what is happening here in the US. Not the media â at least, not the increasingly smug, complacent, centre-left-leaning, liberal progressive, mainstream media â who failed to appreciate what was happening outside their immediate metropolitan elite circles. Not the politicians, and not even the pollsters, whose job it is to know these things.
To all of them, the political events of 2016 came as a terrible shock. Brexit, Trump and the rise of the populist far right in continental Europe were unforeseen, inexplicable and alien. To them, it was as if the world had lost its senses, as if the natural order of things was thrown into tumult, as if prejudice and ignorance was running amok. It was unsettling and it challenged assumptions.
The game had changed. Out was the old politics of left and right. In was a new politics, more complex and more assertive. It was the politics of revolt.
Trump has an innate ability to identify an opportunity and exploit it. He spoke to, persuaded and eventually dazzled parts of America that felt the country was no longer theirs, and who were crying out for someone to speak up on their behalf. Trump was that man. For all his foibles, weaknesses and character flaws, he was the one politician who seemed to care â and he played the part brilliantly.
His timing was ingenious. America was ready for him, and he was ready for America. He had also become a big name. It helped that he had starred in a primetime reality show, The Apprentice, for fourteen seasons, and had given hundreds of interviews. CNN worked out that he had spent more time in front of a camera than even the Hollywood movie actor Ronald Reagan.
So, Trump mastered the media, then manipulated it for his own purposes and ultimately turned it into enemy number one. It was all very clever, insightful and perfectly legitimate as a political calculation, and highlights the great strength of Donald Trump.
Less legitimate â in fact, downright cynical â was his courting of a subset of American voters who remain consumed by racial prejudice. These are not only white supremacists, but also a substantial block of the white working class who fear immigration and harbour resentment against the black and Latin American minorities in America.
How did he do it? Well, partly by questioning the birthplace of Americaâs first black president, Barack Obama. âIâm starting to think that he was not born here,â he said. There was not a shred of evidence to support Trumpâs claims, but it gained traction with a racist minority that he decided were his potential voters. It was deeply cynical, hugely offensive to many, but also highly effective.
And just as effective was his promise to build the wall along the border with Mexico. He played on the fears of many white working people about the growth of immigration. Across the Midwest rust belt of America, in towns where steel and coal jobs were being decimated and livelihoods ruined, he spread the message that immigrants were the problem: You donât have your jobs because of immigrants. It wasnât true. Their jobs were gone. No one had them. But again it resonated, it hit home.
Even the Access Hollywood tape â in which he can be heard boasting about how he treats women, and how when youâre a powerful celebrity you can do anything, even âgrab âem by the pussyâ â even that didnât stall his progress to the White House. It was extraordinary.
It was also, of course, as much a vote against Hillary Clinton as it was for Donald Trump. While Trump courted the white working class, Hillary Clinton ignored it. Part of the blame, perhaps, lies indirectly with her husband Bill. The immensely popular former president expanded the appeal of the Democratic Party, and it became the party of choice for the professional classes of America.
Lawyers, teachers and the educated classes began embracing the party of Bill Clinton in large numbers. The Democrats, for so long the natural home for blue-collar workers across America, had changed. Many in the working classes saw this transformation and resented it. It also didnât help that while Trump made several visits to the Midwest of the US, Hillary made only a few.
For all these reasons, the greatest political earthquake in the history of modern America was triggered.
At the election in 2016, Trump won 63 million votes, and tens of millions of voters continue to support him. No one believed it until it happened. He stunned America, the world â and, by his own admission to colleagues, himself.
Yes, Trump is in the White House. Itâs for real. And itâs the single most extraordinary political story of my lifetime. So when the opportunity came to spend a year covering this phenomenon called the âTrump presidencyâ for Sky News, I leapt at the chance and hotfooted it to Washington DC, where this bizarre, thrilling, crazy, intoxicating, unedifying, depressing, unpredictable drama is being played out on a daily basis.
Every day, almost every hour, seems to bring another remarkable twist or turn in the Trump story. It is a story like no other, and it raises all sorts of questions about how to report it.
Just as there are no rules for President Donald Trump â or no rules that we recognize â so the rules have changed when it comes to covering him. On my several visits to Washington pre-Trump, it always surprised me how deferential journalists were towards presidents, and senior politicians in general. But particularly presidents. There has long been a reverence among reporters for the office of the president, which has always translated to whichever individual happens to be occupying the White House. It is just the way it is. It is a marked contrast to Britain, where, if anything, the general attitude of the press towards politicians, even prime ministers, is one of scepticism, suspicion, sometimes ridicule and often outright contempt.
In America, those who go into politics are genuinely seen as serving the American people and serving the country. In Britain, they are often seen as serving themselves, and in it for the publicity and the expenses. Broadly speaking, Britain is way too disdainful; and America has been way too respectful.
Not anymore. With Trump has come an erosion of the mediaâs respect for the presidency. In fact, following his sustained attack on many of the countryâs mainstream news outlets and his tedious âfake newsâ retort to anything he disagrees with, it is not so much an erosion as a complete disintegration of respect for the president. It makes for an uncomfortable and often unpleasant relationship. It is tense, demeaning and unedifying. And it is ultimately bad for democracy, and for holding the government to account.
On arriving in Washington DC, in September 2017, I had a problem: how to cover this extraordinary story and this unusual, unpredictable and nonconformist president.
I had noticed the reporting of many mainstream TV correspondents was tinged with a kind of haughty disdain for Trump, which at times turned to outright contempt. Certainly, CNN and MSNBC are openly and unapologetically critical of Trump. They really do have nothing good to say about him. I am stunned by some of the coverage from previously largely impartial media outlets.
There is no question that Trump â with his weird combover, orange complexion, habitual tweeting, glib pronouncements, and strange ways â cuts a vaguely comedic figure as president. But he is also occupying the office of the most powerful leader in the world. Everything he says and does is significant, has consequences and shouldnât be trivialized or dismissed.
As I flew across the pond, I also thought that he deserved to be treated with the same seriousness and respect as previous presidents. He had won an election, after all. The people of America had decided that Donald J. Trump was the man to represent and lead them around the world, and that was important. Free elections sometimes throw up random and awkward results, but that is the nature of democracy â and the job of a journalist, or at least a correspondent working for an impartial British television news channel, should be to report in good faith and without bias what the president does and says, what it may mean, and what the consequences are likely to be.
Anyway, whoâs to say this was an âawkwardâ or ârandomâ result? As I arrived in Washington, some journalists and columnists were already reporting the Trump presidency as some sort of political âfreak showâ. It is much easier to mock this president than to take him seriously, but trying to be fair is the challenge you have to set yourself every day. My view was that if enough Americans had deemed him a suitable candidate for the White House, why should I sneer?
In London, before flying out, Iâd asked John Ryley, the boss of Sky News, how he thought I should go about reporting this strange phenomenon. âYou must report it as it deserves to be reported,â he said. âAnd try not to lose the sense of impartiality.â He said this as if he knew it might be difficult.
So I pitched up in DC with the firm intent to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to find out about his followers and what motivates and drives their support for him, and I wanted to ensure I gave their views a real airing. In short, I wanted to cover President Trump as I would any other American president.
It soon became obvious that this would be impossible. The sheer unrelenting deluge of news from the Trump White House was overwhelming. Almost every week brought a new drama that would provoke a media frenzy for seventy-two hours or so, until, as sure as night follows day, it would be usurped by the next one. And it would be Trumpâs reaction to the media reaction to the initial drama that would keep the story rolling frenetically along.
Covering this White House is unremitting, and a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose. You canât really do it, and no one turns the fire hose off, so in the end you just stand there and get drenched. Trump is a day-to-day, moment-to-moment presence in your working life, and oneâs reporting of him becomes instinctive and emotionally driven in a way that I am not sure is terribly useful to the public.
âYou know Trump is a pathological liar,â a senior correspondent with a top US broadcaster said to me within a few days of my arrival in Washington. âHe tells untruths and seldom gets called out for it.â
I disagree with him. I think Trump tells lies but he does generally get caught out and challenged. The fact checking site, PolitiFact, has never been busier⌠Early in the presidency it deemed that just 5 per cent of Trumpâs statements were true and 26 per cent were mostly true. But a huge 69 per cent were found to be basically porky pies â the worst rating for a president. And most papers or political magazines have tried to chronicle Trumps fibs at one time or another. The Washington Post decided that Trump made 492 false or misleading claims in his first 100 days. Politicoâs Maria Konnikova made the point that all presidents lie but that Trump âis in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent.â
She argues that Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were economical with the truth or lied to protect their own reputations, but âTrump seems to lie for the pure joy of itâ.
It began on day one, with his claims of the largest inauguration crowd ever. It set a pattern. He also claimed Hillary Clinton had five million illegal voters and that he had the longest list of congressional achievements since Roosevelt, even before his tax bill was passed. It was preposterous.
Elizabeth Drew, a political journalist and author who has covered six presidents, told me: âTrump lies far more than any president ever. He lies all the time, every day. Youâve seen the statistics, theyâre stunning.â
The New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, went further: âTrumpâs incessant lying is obscene. It is a collapse in morality; it is an ethical assault.â
I know what he means. The danger is that, eventually, constant lying will batter a nation and its people into submission. It becomes a kind of distorted reality, and in the end people are too exhausted to question or fight back.
Watching him up close in Washington and around the country, I am not at all sure that Donald Trump is wilfully dishonest. It seems to me that he sometimes says the first thing that comes into his head to defend his position. I am certainly not saying that Trump has even a token obedience to the truth, but sometimes he just repeats claims heâs heard that suit his arguments, and other times I think he ...