Harold Holzer, author of "The Presidents vs. The Press: The Endless Battle Between the White House and the Media" is one of the country's foremost Lincoln historians. In his latest book, he goes into juicy detail about how presidents have manipulated, deceived, and done battle with media that cover them.
Insider columnist Anthony Fisher spoke with Holzer this week about the presidents who viciously assaulted press freedom (they all had their reasons), why former President Donald Trump's Twitter ban might feel good but carry a high price, and how President Biden lucked into taking office during a "stay-at-home virtual reality."
This interview has been edited for length, style, and clarity.
As the title of your book implies, no president has had a very good relationship with the press. But which ones have had the worst relationships with the press?
Throughout the 19th century, presidents actually had very good relationships with the press that represented their own political party. They were delightful to their allies. Andrew Jackson invited journalists into his cabinet, and also his "kitchen cabinet."
Abraham Lincoln made a Republican editor his chief of staff and encouraged both of his private secretaries to write anonymous editorials for the press. The only time Lincoln actually talked to a Democratic journalist was Nathaniel Hawthorne.
There was a joke at the time that the New York Tribune will probably soon be unable to publish a morning edition because so many veterans of the newsroom had been given diplomatic posts.
In terms of the worst, I still give first place to John Adams.
Contrary to the constitutional guarantees of free press and free speech, he signed and enforced a federal law that made it a crime to criticize or even ridicule the president. And he personally directed his attorney general to pursue anti-Federalist editors. A number of them were prosecuted. They went on trial in federal court, which was about as stacked a court as you can get because for the first 12 years of the Republic, every federal judge had been appointed by a Federal president — either Washington or Adams. And editors were put in jail.
Whatever the rhetoric that Donald Trump became infamous for, whatever has the damage he did to commonly accepted truth.
Lincoln and his administration had more than 200 editors prosecuted by military tribunals, or just thrown into federal prisons without any trial until they signed a loyalty oath.
The justification for shutting down border state newspapers, in the early days of the Civil War, was in order to keep Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland in the Union you had to suppress anti-Union sentiment. So newspapers were shut down. Printing presses were confiscated. Editors were shipped out of the South to New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore. Some were hauled off to Washington to testify. Eventually the crackdown spread to Northern cities, and the post office wouldn't even mail pro-Democratic newspapers.
If you look at the recent observations by journalists in their memoirs, they were particularly angry at the way they were treated when Barack Obama was president. When both [former New York Times reporter] James Risen and [former Fox News reporter] James Rosen were both wiretapped in search of leaks, they both said this is the most anti-press president in recent history. At the time Obama was willing to crack down using the hundred-year-old Espionage Act that Woodrow Wilson had instituted during World War I.
It's obviously not an apples to apples comparison, but can you compare and contrast Trump's "enemies of the people" rhetoric and generally obnoxious posture towards the media with Obama invoking the Espionage Act to investigate two inconvenient reporters?
Which one is the more profoundly serious threat to press freedom?
I don't think either of them ended up threatening press freedom permanently.
Obama's presidency was at a time when technology was changing the way news is distributed, or leaked. I think of WikiLeaks and all the things that happened during Obama's time, he was navigating new ground. I don't think he goes into history as a president who's very open to the press. A great example that I found for the book is that he once received an award for his openness to press inquiry, but he made it so the press wasn't allowed into the awards ceremony.
In terms of Trump, the crucial damage he did is that we can no longer in this country agree on a universal truth about anything — including vaccines as new polls show, let alone election results. But that's part of his attack against all aspects of truth and unity and national interest.
In the end, I think he was simply so disorganized that he just mouthed off and never did anything [to the press]. I just hope that he didn't do permanent damage, and that we can return to sort of a common wheel approach. Maybe not in my lifetime, but someday.
If you look at the transcripts of FDR's press conferences, and I read all 998 of them, there were moments when he was really irritated at the questions. He'd say things to reporters like "That's a dumb question," or even "Go stand in the corner and put your dunce cap on." And these were the guys not reporting on things that he didn't want them to report, like his disability.
Distrust in media
Trust in the media continues to set new records for all-time lows. Does the political news media deserve its terrible reputation? And does it really matter how the public feels about how the media covers politics?
That's a great question. Yes, it matters because people are going to consume the reporting and react to it. People have always hated the media. If you look at the history of American journalism and its relationship to presidential leadership, it has always been partisan.
George Washington crushed a newspaper under his shoes. Lincoln was asked "Do you rely on newspapers?" He said, "Yes, because they lie."
In the 19th century, Democrats hated Republican newspapers and Republican hated Democratic newspapers and would've rated them below zero if they had public opinion polls.
The introduction of cable news has been as consequential in creating these partisan platforms was the introduction of the steam press. The newspapers weren't turned out by the hand crank anymore, and they could print 50,000 copies in three hours. And I think we're in the era of the high-tech steam press now. So I don't take [the poll numbers] too seriously because people are still consuming news.
Do press conferences matter anymore?
In the first year of George HW Bush's presidency, he held 27 press conferences. Bill Clinton held 11, George W. Bush held four, and Obama held seven. Trump held one. Now Biden's scheduled his first after two months in office.
But technology has allowed presidents to completely bypass the media. Do formal presidential press conferences even matter much anymore?
I think they're largely ceremonial. But they matter because the press wants a story in the few moments when there's no story, quite frankly.
I would say Biden's [future] availability will depend on what kind of press conference he has for the debut. If it becomes a war zone, it's not going to happen very often. If it's really informational and makes the kind of news he wants to make, it'll happen more frequently. But Jimmy Carter certainly soured on these immediately because he thought every member of the press was out to get him.
What people want to see in these prime time press conferences is really more performance art than the news. They want to know that the president is confident that he knows everything. Even though we know he doesn't have to know everything — he can ask someone on his staff — he needs to seem confident and in charge. That's what Biden is going to have to do.
The invisible president
Biden made staying out of public view a feature of his campaign, and that's continued now that he's in office. Can he really do this for four years?
There's a visual metaphor not only on our faces, but in our faces right now. And that's the mask. Biden is literally behind the mask.
More literally, as long as the lockdown and the restrictions are in place, he can pretty much function as a pandemic president — not mingling and chatting and restricting the public face part of the presidency.
It's a gamble, but he won the presidency without doing a heck of a lot of outward campaigning. Donald Trump may have stirred up an extra 5 million votes by hitting the trail, but it wasn't enough.
It sounds critical, but we're in a virtual world reality, the stay at home reality. And as long as we're in this condition, Biden can do that.
Your book came out in August 2020, before Trump was permanently banned from Twitter. How much does that impact Biden's presidency, with Trump unable to instantly critique his every move?
It's made an enormous difference. Though at some point I think we have to step back and examine whether that is too high a price to pay for giving any president a press honeymoon.
Even though Trump violates all the traditions of decency, legality of transition, gentlemanly behavior, and all of that — is it too high a price to pay to say, "We are closing off all avenues of speech because the guy behaves like a lunatic?" I am not sure.
I think the peace [of Trump being off Twitter] is wonderful. I'm so happy. Although we still hear things. His office issues statements. And he'll go on Fox and get incredibly leading softball questions.
So you think that Biden's honeymoon period is more comfortable than typical because Trump's been somewhat sidelined?
Absolutely. If you've got an ex-president who defies all norms and doesn't shut up, it certainly helps the honeymooner to be able to enjoy Niagara Falls.
Biden's gotten Trump off his back as a four times daily Twitter critic, and he's gotten press conferences off the agenda for a while. He's created a great run himself.
My publisher is letting me do a new preface for the paperback edition acknowledging what's happened since the 2020 election. So I get to talk about how presidents have behaved in presidential transitions, which I didn't put it in the other book and write with apologies for my own lack of prescience.
I also wanted to tell the story that I actually decided to leave out of the book because I didn't think anybody would care.
Woodrow Wilson went out of sight in Paris during the post-World War I peace conference and the press couldn't get a handle on what was going on. He had been pretty terrible to them anyway, because although Wilson brought a lot of journalists with [his entourage] to Europe, he then refused to brief them. So they were totally out of contact with the negotiations, and then he disappeared.
It turned out he had the Spanish flu.
But I left it out of the book because I figured, "Who cares about a kind of a pandemic that will never happen again?"
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