By Jay Ambrose

Tribune News Service

“The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”

—H. L. Mencken

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew how to do it. President Donald Trump doesn’t. When Trump tangles with news outlets that wish him no good, it’s with venom and a broad brush that invite retaliation. FDR employed a political strategy and not least of all humor that carried the day.

And when Trump skips the mediators to communicate with the public directly, it’s with short, squeaky, small-minded, half-considered, ugly tweets. When FDR did it, it was with uplifting charm and warmth on radio fireside chats that a historian tells us had been rewritten at least a half dozen times.

The Trump style, or lack of it, has been on full display lately. Furious at news media sometimes adversarial to the point of blatant animosity, he first off conducted a wild and wooly press conference in which he called reporters dishonest, the tools of special interests and purveyors of fake news.

There was then a speech to conservatives applauding his lines about some outlets serving as enemies of the people. And, among other affronts, the president said he was not going to attend the upcoming dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an occasion when presidents usually jokingly jab the audience, other speakers jab back and everyone goes home happy.

The consequence of all this has not just been reminders by news voices about how crucial news coverage is to a democracy. The consequence has also been fear and loathing made clear in comparisons of Trump with dictatorial villains who have murdered journalists and shut down news operations. Multiple minds seem to have forgotten that President Barack Obama spied on the press while threatening some reporters with jail and fostering transparency of a kind best described as blindfolds at midnight.

But now we get to FDR, who happened to be detested by newspaper publishers astonished at his politics. His answer, it has been noted, was twice-a-week Oval Office press conferences in which he courteously befriended and courted reporters with information that won their appreciation as it furthered his own agenda.

As for speaking at reporter gatherings, he loved it, as he showed at the 1934 Gridiron dinner hosted by none other than the then-famous, literarily talented journalist and great acerbic wit, H.L. Mencken, someone with more disdain for FDR than all those publishers put together.

When it came FDR’s time to talk, he laid it on tougher than Trump at his press conference, saying the “rascality” of those newspaper owners came in second to “the stupidity, cowardice and philistinism of working newspapermen.” He called them ignoramuses and worse and finally got around to the words in the politically incorrect quote above. Not only are stupidity and cowardice brought up again, but we also hear about injustice, tastelessness and dishonor.

It finally hit the crowd, a bit of history tells us: FDR was quoting a humorously intended Mencken passage, and although Mencken himself was furious, the audience was delighted and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Trump and Roosevelt are separated by eight decades, different technologies, different circumstances of all kinds and different personalities, to say the least. But they also have a lot in common. They are full of policy ambitions seen as essential to the country’s interests and a need to win public support through media outreach.

FDR got something enacted called the New Deal. It wouldn’t hurt for Trump to study him some.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.