Earlier this month, I argued that the president has a fundamentally different way of measuring media. Instead of balancing positive against negative coverage in order to suss out average sentiment, the president views all media coverage as a tool to advance his agenda. The media is both incapable of understanding this different sort of math and entirely complicit in letting the president get away with it.
Stark evidence that I’m right came in this morning’s remarkable Washington Post profile of A.G. Sulzberger, the recently-appointed, 37-year-old publisher of The New York Times, who on July 20th had a bizarre Oval Office visit with the president. (It’s both a remarkable story on its own merits and also remarkable that the Post would give such positive attention to the publisher of its rival, The Times.)
Here’s the revelatory snippet about the president’s obsessive hate/love fixation with The Times:
The president’s obsession with The Times reminds me of how W. H. Auden described the devil’s obsession with goodness in a little-known but powerful essay, “Infernal Science”* —
The Evil One is not interested in evil, for evil is, by definition, what he believes he already knows. To him, Auschwitz is a banal fact, like the date of the battle of Hastings. He is only interested in good, as that which he has so far failed to understand in terms of his absolute presuppositions; Goodness is his obsession.
As I argued in my essay about AQ or Attention Quotient, the president doesn’t hate what he pillories as the fake news that relentlessly criticizes him, he loves it, plays it like a fiddle, but because it does not square with his limitless self-regard he does not understand it, and therefore it obsesses him.
* The essays is a postscript to his book The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, which you can read for free at The Internet Archive, although you’ll have to search the word “infernal” to save yourself a lot of scrolling.
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