https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/actually-melania-your-disappearance-is-a-legitimate-news-story/2018/06/05/99294790-6813-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html
She’s a public figure, whose staff and security cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year. When she announces her pro-kids campaign or wears a statement white chapeau or attends a state dinner, news coverage is expected.
It comes with the territory, whether that territory is something she sought or not.
And so, too, when she does something highly unusual, such as drop off the scene altogether.
“What Mrs. Trump has executed here seems unprecedented,” Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University who studies first ladies, told Katie Rogers of the New York Times. “I don’t know what we want to call this period where she hasn’t been in view. Respite from the role of first lady? Vacation from first lady? Medical recovery period?”
Whatever it is, it’s odd and worthy of notice.
The pro-Trump media is, of course, playing its expected role in defending the first lady’s privacy.
On Fox News Channel’s “The Five,” Greg Gutfeld took a shot at CNN’s Brian Stelter, mocking him as “the nation’s hall monitor” for devoting a segment of his “Reliable Sources” show to her absence.
Granted, it’s largely the gossip value — not any crucial public interest — of the Melania Trump story that makes up most of its appeal. And granted, the first lady deserves a measure of privacy: less than her son, more than her husband.
And, also granted: This is happening at a time when the priorities of the mainstream media are reasonably being criticized.
Scant attention was paid, for example, to new reports about the estimated thousands of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria last year in Puerto Rico, far more than the official government count.
As James Downie aptly wrote in The Washington Post: “On the major Sunday talk shows — the purest distillation of what the media and political establishments consider worth discussing — not once was Puerto Rico mentioned. That is a disgrace.”
And, day after day, the journalistic obsession with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation probably far outstrips the public’s level of interest.
Still, beyond the talk value of the Melania Trump story, there is a reason to care. And a reason to pay heed.
It’s this: The Trump administration specializes in knocking down well-established norms of how the government and the public — and the media — behave toward one another. These norms are part of the glue of a functioning democracy.
It’s important for the news media to report on how those norms are eroding, to keep track of the changes, whether radical or superficial.
The unprecedented weeks-long absence of the first lady might not rank particularly high in that order, but it’s still worthy of notice.
So, Melania, we’ll be looking for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
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