Katy Tur: Why I'm nervous to be a journalist in Trump's America
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“I was talking to someone high up in the RNC [Republican National Committee] and he said ‘it’s over: you can’t go after a POW. He served this country. No Republican electorate would ever stand for this’,” Tur recalls. “And I went to a rally a couple of weeks later in Mobile, Alabama and there were 20,000 people. And I thought ‘he’s not going anywhere, and the voters don’t really care’.” Trump, of course, was only just getting started. In the coming months, voters would would hear him “brag about grabbing women by the pussy, denigrate the judicial system, demonise immigrants, fight with the Pope, doubt the democratic process, advocate torture and war crimes, tout the size of his junk in a presidential debate, trash the media” – and 63 million people would vote for him anyway.
Although Unbelievable is a zippy first-hand account rather than a work of political analysis, Tur does attempt to explain Trump’s appeal. “Look, I get it,” she writes, paraphrasing the supporters she meets. “You can’t tell a joke without worrying you’ll lose your job. Your 20-something can’t find work. Your town is boarded up. Patriotism gets called racism. Your food is full of chemicals. Your body is full of pills. You call tech support and reach someone in India. On top of it all, no one seems to care.”
From her position in the press pen – “caged in the centre of the arena like a modern-day Roman Coliseum” – she describes the atmosphere at Trump rallies, crackling with latent violence. She details the vitriol and misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton: the chants of “lock her up,” the T-shirts reading “She’s A C**t, Vote Trump”, “Hillary For Prison” and “Trump That Bitch”, and finds there are limits to her empathy. She doesn’t mention the shirt reading “Rope, Tree, Journalist: Some assembly required”, but those were on sale, too.
As an infant, Tur was soothed to sleep by the static of a scanner tuned to police frequencies. Her parents, founders of the Los Angeles News Service, were pioneers of news-as-live-entertainment, filming police chases, shootings, riots and Madonna’s wedding from the air. One could argue that they bear as much responsibility for the current presidency-as-reality-show as anyone.
Tur had worked her way up through WPIX, Fox 5, the Weather Channel and WNBC, but after nine years on air was still a relative unknown when she got the Trump gig. An exclusive half-hour interview at Trump Tower in July 2015, broadcast in full by MSNBC, earned her national attention – and the enduring fascination of the candidate himself.
Article source: http://watoday.com.au/queensland/a-woman-has-died-in-a-gold-coast-car-crash-20171002-p4yw8m.html
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