| The framing was intriguing: To hear these seasoned reporters tell it, the sights on the South Lawn weren’t wrong or unusual, but rather unexpected and hard to imagine. By this time next month, the president may have had many more Hatch Act–violating events at the White House for the purposes of his campaign. At that point, it will no longer be unexpected or hard to imagine—and the wrongness and illegality will be even more difficult to make a stink about. These corruptions are on their way to being normalized.
At least Karl and Mitchell deemed the matter worthy to share with the public. The most galling reaction to this sudden uptick of interest in Hatch Act violations came from the clapped-out Washington elite’s favorite tip sheet, Politico Playbook, whose authors wrote on Wednesday that while Trump’s plans violated these ethical guidelines and it was, they supposed, “incumbent on the media to point that out,” what people really needed was a healthy dose of BELTWAY STRAIGHT TALK: “Do you think a single person outside the Beltway gives a hoot about the president politicking from the White House or using the federal government to his political advantage? Do you think any persuadable voter even notices?”
Leaving aside the fact that Playbook never includes material that anyone from outside the Beltway gives a hoot about, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Hatch Act seeks to do: prevent the trappings and symbols of the federal government from being used to influence persuadable voters by subtly granting the incumbent a grander look and feel. As former congressional reporter Meredith Shiner exasperatedly tweeted, “This is an emerging media narrative—that normal people won’t care about the law being broken—when that’s the point of breaking it!”
If “persuadable voters” don’t notice the law being broken, it’s the job of reporters to point it out and make sure they notice. Smugly smirking with your elite Beltway readers about what the rubes that live in the hinterlands care about is a different sort of choice that a different (by which I mean bad) sort of reporter makes.
In the days before Trump’s inauguration, when ethics officials were sounding alarms about how easy it would be for Trump to violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, Christina Wilkie and I wrote a story for the Huffington Post that attempted to explain why these concerns were of pressing interest to the public. A key thing to remember is that the Emoluments Clause, like the Hatch Act, can’t enforce itself: There aren’t ethics RoboCops that fly into action when a violation occurs. These are norms that we count on our elected officials not to disrupt. It worked relatively well until Trump came along with his immunity to opprobrium and shame.
Now that these norms are being disrupted, journalists are not supposed to dismiss them as mere trifles. As Wilkie and I pointed out in our story, such norms can be granted a measure of protection via “public pressure from public exposure.” That is to say, the relentless journalistic pursuit of norm-breaking violations can create the condition where the demand for accountability can’t be ignored. It may sound far-fetched, but there are real-world examples in which the intensity of media scrutiny created these conditions. Consider, if you will, what might happen if the media rabidly covered the sketchy operational security of a presidential candidate’s private email server, publishing hundreds upon hundreds of stories about it. It’s possible to make a big deal out of anything; these means can be put to the ends of serving the public interest.
So what’s to be done with reporters who don’t think the gradual erosion of American democracy is a big deal? We could replace them, for a start. In the meantime, if a journalist behaves as if the potential slide into authoritarianism isn’t something you should worry about, then maybe that’s because they know it won’t materially affect them.
—Jason Linkins, deputy editor | 