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The Fourth Estate tackles the Trump Effect on journalism

THE FOURTH ESTATE (Liz Garbus) premieres Sunday (May 27) at 8 pm on CraveTV.


The New York Times was among the media outlets that predicted Hillary Clinton would win an easy victory in the 2016 presidential race. The spectre of that massive miscalculation hangs over the first episode of Liz Garbus’s four-part docuseries The Fourth Estate, which follows the paper’s reporters over a year and a half as they cover Donald Trump’s presidency.

After a campaign in which Trump successfully demonized the media to his advantage, it seemed like the paper, in its myopia, walked right into his rhetorical trap. In the opening moments of episode one, executive editor Dean Baquet admits the Times got it wrong, but is quick to move on: “Great stories trump everything else, right?” he tells his team.

Garbus shadows prominent investigative reporters – including White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller and Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt – fly-on-the-wall style as they work around the clock covering the non-stop scandals generated by the Trump White House.

Given journalists’ disdain for being covered by other journalists, Garbus (What Happened Miss Simone?) and co-director Jenny Carchman had their work cut out. What emerges is a portrait of a collaborative, competitive newsroom adjusting to an accelerated pace and shrinking social lives in a media environment already radically altered by the online world and newsroom layoffs.

Though Trump professes he hates the Times, Haberman – who covered Trump as a municipal politics reporter for the New York Post in the 90s – explains to colleagues that he craves the paper’s stamp of approval. The series captures Times reporters covering big stories such as the Stormy Daniels affair, James Comey’s firing, the Don Jr. Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives and the FBI raid at the home of former campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as the sexual harassment allegations against former Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly.

In one of the best scenes, Garbus captures a moment when the unflappable Bumiller seems to suppress her ire after the New York office reframes her story about Trump’s inaugural address to the joint session of congress from being about immigration to “trivial fights.”

Exemplifying the filmmakers’ challenge, Baquet deflects, ironically chalking the rewrite up to jockeying between the DC and NYC offices.

In April, NOW sat down with Garbus, Carchman and producer Justin Wilkes to talk about Trump’s impact on journalism before The Fourth Estate screened at Hot Docs.

In her White House Correspondents’ Dinner roast, Michelle Wolf ended by pointing out that Trump is good for the media business. The media helped create him and he’s selling newspapers. Do you agree?

Liz Garbus: Her comment certainly resonated with me. First of all, we have to separate print journalism from the 24-hour cable news networks. They are serving different purposes. In my view, cable news was quite appalling during the 2016 election. The newspapers managed to balance out their coverage of Trump with other things happening in the world.

But there is a truth to [Wolf’s comments]. From a business point of view, the New York Times is doing really well in the Trump era. Subscriptions have grown. People are paying attention to news and politics in a way that they weren’t before. After the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement there was peace in this country and we took a free press for granted. Yes, a lot more of these writers have book deals and big Twitter followings and the New York Times have picked up subscribers, but I don’t think they are responsible for his election.

That is way too easy an answer. It is very complicated and I think it’s a great discussion she’s provoking.

The first episode touches on the fast pace of the Trump administration. By the time the show airs, there will be so many new Trump-related developments. Does that pace affect documentarians the way it impacts journalists?

LG: We’re not competing with news and books. If there was another a documentary about the journalists at the Washington Post doing their jobs, I’d feel bummed. We’re looking at the process of journalism. It’s not a book that is feeding into the palace intrigue. The series is never meant to work at the speed of breaking news.

Justin Wilkes: We’re telling the stories of milestone moments over the last year and it’s how those stories came to be in the first place – and that’s timeless. We shot for a year and a half and then went into an edit room and looked back with a little bit of a lens to say what moments added up to what we’re facing now. There will be a relevancy to the stories in the series when it comes out in May.

Journalists are already workaholics, so what has Trump meant for journalists’ work lives?

Jenny Carchman: In Washington, DC, where the nucleus of these stories are, they work around the clock. They thought Hillary was going to win and that they would go back to normal life after the campaign. The kind of story happens every day would happen once a week [when Obama was president]. It’s put so much pressure on the bureau and the paper itself. They need to figure out how they are going to pay for more journalists. It’s enormously taxing.

One scene in the first episode shows Trump’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he called the media “the enemy of the people.” Do you hope this series plays a role in pushing back against that rhetoric?

LG: That was the first time he used that phrase so it was a real escalation in discourse. As [politics reporter] Jeremy Peters walks around that conference, people say to him, “Oh, you must hate me,” but as soon as they meet him they’re like, “No, you seem fine.” I hope the film is a similar experience – journalists seem like fine people, not rabid revolutionaries. There is a bit of a disillusionment about what it looks like inside the Times. It’s not the headquarters of the resistance.

But does that matter? Trump and his supporters will spin or justify anything however they can to further their political agenda.

JW: In later episodes we follow reporters out into the country and meet people who are trying to get food on the table and still support Trump. We do live in a media bubble. When you get outside New York, L.A. or Toronto and you’re not as attuned to the news cycle as we all are, other things are important to you. There’s a rationale that you can build to say that building the wall is important to me. That person believes that and that speaks to the job the Times has to do. You still have to be balanced and get every side of the story. Clearly they didn’t get it right in 2016. Baquet admits at the beginning of the first episode that they got it wrong. They missed a whole part of the story. It takes a lot for someone to admit that.

Do you think part of the reason they agreed to being in this series was to make amends and have an extra level of transparency?

JC: I can’t answer that in regards to the apology, but they recognized how historic this [presidency] was going to be. How huge it was and how much they wanted to do this series and be transparent – not about sources, but about their process and how they were trying to get the story right. There’s nothing to hide in that.

LG: I don’t think they were atoning for the 2016 election. I think they weren’t comfortable when I would question them about the 2016 election. I don’t think it was their desire to reopen that. I think they felt this was going to be an incredible year in American politics. They could’ve circled the wagons and locked the gates, but they let us in and allowed us to be part of the process.

Who was the most challenging person to film with?

LG: I’ll take the fifth. I’m not naming any names, but I’ll say that some of the journalists were the most difficult subjects I’ve dealt with as a filmmaker – and I’ve shot in places like prisons. So that’s saying a lot. I do think they are under extraordinary pressure. They’re under the microscope and we were an additional annoyance to them.

You filmed the Times breaking stories around the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. But many say there’s no smoking gun yet. Whatever happens, the administration pushes on and say it’s not incriminating for the president.

LG: There’s a tremendous amount of evidence in plain sight around interactions between the Trump campaign officials and Russian spies. There’s not a direct line to Trump himself, so if that’s what you’re looking for as a smoking gun, that’s not there. But the amount of evidence and what we know of what went on in 2016 is pretty extraordinary. [These revelations] would’ve killed many other politicians. The bar for what a smoking gun is has gotten higher. I think it’s a sad statement that we are numb to that.

kevinr@nowtoronto.com | @kevinritchie

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