PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

As a former reporter for a daily newspaper in Oregon – not to mention serving as press secretary for an Oregon congressman and an Oregon governor – I have had a huge dose of questions about how the media covers Donald Trump, or, perhaps, should cover him.

Of course, it’s challenge, given Trump’s unpredictable, if not impulsive, behavior. And his continuing diversion to his Twitter account makes it even more difficult for reporters and editors to separate the wheat from the chaff.

At some points along the way of the last two years of Trump, I have advocated that the media just ignore the Trump tweets. Are they really “news?” I don’t think so.

They are just Trump’s attempt to divert the media from covering real news in the Trump Administration and Congress. If he calls Senator Elizabeth Warren a name via tweet, as he did again yesterday, then that becomes a news story.

Sorry. It shouldn’t be.

What would make more sense is for reporters and editors to focus, or example, on the attempt in Congress to broker a way to avoid another government shutdown. Many of the real journalists have done just that as the vote approaches on a compromise to avoid another disaster.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, journalist and author, Jill Abramson, asked a basic question: “Will the media ever figure out how to cover Trump? “

She adds this paragraph:

“The news media’s collective shock that Donald Trump won in 2016 was evidence of how out of touch most reporters were with the less affluent, less educated, rural parts of the country, where white voter rage galvanized into votes that made him the 45th president. In the days after the election, there was anguished self-examination in many newsrooms and vows to cover the parts of the United States that had been mistakenly overlooked.

“But more than two years later, the same question bedevils journalism: Can our tribe cover their tribe?”

Now, it is true that, shortly after publication of her piece in the Wall Street Journal, Abramson’s reputation was sullied a bit based on a charge that she had plagiarized portions of her book.

No way for me to know whether the charge is true, but true or not, Abramson has what I consider to be good advice for the media.

“There is little evidence,” she writes, “that reporters have fulfilled their pledge to report on and reflect the interests and values of the people who voted for Trump. There have been some good dispatches from the heartland, but too often what is published amounts to the proverbial ‘toe touch in Appalachia.’”

Abramson said was “powerfully moved by a recent article in the New Yorker about journalism by LBJ biographer Robert Caro.” He described how he couldn’t really understand President Lyndon B. Johnson’s native Texas Hill Country until he and his wife actually moved there from New York City for three years. The locals had a derisive name for the reporters who parachuted in and out: “Portable journalists,” they called them.

Quoting Abramson further: “The rhythm of the Internet has made spending a week reporting a story a rare luxury. But our cocooning on the liberal coasts has intensified because of other factors in the past decade. One is the virtual disappearance of local newspapers, their business models irrevocably broken by the disappearance of print advertising.

“With the possible exception of the Wall Street Journal, the most influential national papers reflect the values of the cities where they are headquartered, New York and Washington.

“Reporters who have contracts with MSNBC and CNN sometimes appear on panels, wedged between Democratic partisans and prosecutors who have already judged the president guilty of grave crimes. They blend and create an appearance of bias. It’s hard for viewers to keep them straight. Twitter is just an open invitation for politically inflamed hyperbole.”

One way out of the reactive cycle, Abramson says, is to report the story from the places where the pro-Trump and Trump-curious live, to cover the facts and truths of their lives.

Such real reporting – call it journalism – would help to understand the push and pull of America, not just the horse race in Washington, D.C. On some days, I wish I go back to being a reporter, knowing what I know now, in order to perform “real journalism.”

In the years since I functioned as a reporter, the news business has changed – dramatically. Social media now pervades everything, making the old “news cycle” about seconds long, instead of daily.

To be sure, that reality changes the news reporting business, but I also think it – the pervasive effect of social media – calls even more strongly for real journalists to return to their roots. Make tough decisions about constitutes “news” and cover real stories, not, again, the “horse race.”

We’d all be better for such an effort.