A Cable News Diet Is Far From a Balanced One

(Bloomberg View) -- We all know President Donald Trump watches way too much cable television news -- political scientist Dave Hopkins has a great item on it. Should he -- should any president -- watch any TV news? 

I'm going to give that one a qualified, careful "yes." But it requires an explanation.

Presidents, as Richard Neustadt said, should crave information. Even our most well-informed presidents simply don't know enough, because there's far too much to know. No one can possibly be an expert on all that presidents must deal with: the politics of dozens of nations, military options, the economy, taxes, health care, education, climate, agriculture, and on and on and on. Just the categories are misleading, since each of them has almost infinite subdivisions. It's helpful for presidents to at least have a general grasp of the most pressing of the policy issues they will face in office, but expecting much more than that is pointless. 

Fortunately, presidents have more resources for obtaining information than anyone else on the planet. They have a huge bureaucracy available to them, and they can order up anything they want from the executive branch's departments and agencies. But presidents discovered long ago that those departments and agencies have agendas of their own, and so their information can come with a bias. That's one of the main reasons presidents from Harry Truman on developed the "presidential branch," which among other things has its own series of experts in agencies such as the National Security Council or the Council of Economic Advisers, who are responsible only to the president and therefore, presumably, speaking only out of their own expertise.

Presidents also receive information from interest groups, political parties, other governments (including both foreign nations and U.S. state and local governments) and more. Most of those come with a clear point of view, but that doesn't mean they can't add to the president's knowledge. 

So why go beyond that? 

Because it's hard to know what's correct. Presidential aides can be vulnerable to groupthink, the tendency of teams of advisers to see things the same way. They're also vulnerable to giving the president whatever he or she wants -- or at least whatever people around the president believe he or she wants. And experts come with their own biases, which may be obscure to those outside academic or professional circles. 

The difficulty, of course, is getting out of the president's own information bubble. That's where presidents have often turned to "kitchen cabinets" of informal networks of friends, some of whom are really outside of politics altogether, for a reality check. It's also why presidents are wise to keep an eye on the mass media. It's not that it gets presidents away from bias. It's that it allows them to visit other bubbles than their usual ones, giving them a way to see what their experts and the interested folks who have regular access to them are missing. 

I'd be OK with a president including cable news as part of that supplement to their information diet. Only with the understanding, however, that it's the extra sugar they're pouring onto their Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, not the core nutritional foods. From all we've heard, Trump has it backward. But that doesn't mean there's nothing a president who has already done his or her homework could learn from those shows. 

1. Richard Skinner on what a large Democratic class of 2018 might look like -- and what it could do in Congress. 

2. Xavier Marquez at the Monkey Cage on flattering Trump. 

3. Brian Beutler on the Senate's questioning of Glenn Simpson. 

4. Nate Silver on the 2018 Senate elections. I tend to agree that Republicans should still be favored to retain a majority. So far. 

5. Jonathan Chait on whether Republicans value smart presidents or not. 

6. And my Bloomberg View colleague Megan McArdle on grappling with the complexity of #MeToo. 

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg View columnist. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net.

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