David Lynch wasn't a Donald Trump ally until the media made him one

The events of the last three days serve as a cautionary tale for the media on how not to play right into Donald Trump's hands and lend legitimacy to his routine and damaging attacks on press honesty.

The mistakes started on Saturday, when The Guardian published an interview with director David Lynch that contains this sudden and brief interpolation of Trump analysis. The paragraph in question read:

"He is undecided about Donald Trump. “He could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.” While Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might. “Our so-called leaders can’t take the country forward, can’t get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.”'

Credit to The Guardian for refraining from putting the obvious shock comment in the headline, but how naive of it to treat the exchange with such brevity.

It's unfortunate but nevertheless still necessary that any and all Trump-related quotes are reproduced in full in 2018, lest they be ran with and misappropriated out of context. Someone "going down in history" suggests a case of public rather than personal perception, and the central thrust of the Bernie Sanders-voting director's comments seemed to be that a new political playing field awaits Democrats when they finally decide to actually step onto it with some kind of coherent message. But why let this stand in the way of a good old "leftist art figure makes surprise pivot to Trump" narrative?

Granted, Lynch's "could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history" comment might not have been particularly wise in the social media era where only the most basic and egregious readings of utterances will do, but in fairness I don't imagine Lynch spends a great deal of time on social media.

Breitbart was quick to dutifully report the auteur's ostensible leap onto the Trump bandwagon, with no mention whatsoever of the fact that Lynch said he didn't think Trump was doing a good job. You might expect as much from a site that seems to exist purely to recruit people to the conservative cause, but not from the likes of Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost and more who similarly ignored the vital disclaimer.

Trump of course revelled in all this, tweeting out the Breitbart story and pronouncing Lynch's career dead at a rally in South Carolina, telling crowds: "There goes his career... in Hollywood.”

I think and hope common sense will prevail here, that David Lynch won't be "cancelled" and cinephiles won't be frisbee-throwing their limited edition Blue Velvet discs into incinerators – but if he is it won't be Hollywood's fault but the media's. Such organisations have a responsibility to convey the nuance of an interviewee's response, or else give them enough rope with which to Kanye themselves.