Donald Trump is presiding over a failing presidency and lashing out at the news media—most recently by banning CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House. There might seem to be a connection between these two things, but the causal link is not that Trump is punishing the press because he is failing; rather, it’s the opposite. His inability to govern is in part a consequence of his hatred for the news media.
Trump has been bullying and manipulating the news media since before he entered politics. And though it may be tempting to believe that his efforts to strangle independent reporting result from his current political travails, he has been pursuing that project throughout his current term. Trump attempted to ban the Associated Press from the White House during his first days in office, when his popularity was at its short-lived apogee. Trump’s most dangerous moves against the media came in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, when some conservatives perceived that the tragedy handed them a window to discredit their critics. In fair weather and foul, Trump simply cannot tolerate critical news coverage.
His belief that the mainstream news media is profoundly biased against him and his party is an article of faith on the political right, although he has pushed much further in response to that belief than any of his predecessors ever dared. More than 50 years ago, conservative distrust of the media was already so deeply entrenched that the Nixon administration could hinge its defense of the Watergate scandal largely on attacking the credibility of reporters uncovering its misconduct.
Many mainstream news outlets really are staffed by reporters and editors whose political views, on average, run to the left of the American public, and their efforts to prevent these predilections from tilting their coverage have not always succeeded. Yet conservatives generally fail to acknowledge that mainstream news organizations are at least trying to report objectively, and that their own relentless lobbying has sometimes prodded the media to overcorrect in their favor.
Instead, the right has treated liberal media bias as one of the fixed truths of its worldview. “There are certain facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute,” argued a Wall Street Journal editorial more than 20 years ago. “One of these—that there is a liberal tilt in the media that shapes news coverage and dictates, all too often, what can and can’t be said on the air or in print—continues to provoke hot denials and even rage.”
Because they consider this bias so pervasive, conservatives rarely make an effort to test it. Bernard Goldberg’s celebrated 2002 book, Bias, which was toted in public by President George W. Bush and reviewed respectfully in mainstream news outlets, suffered from “the epistemological trap of interpreting every news story that jibes with your ideology as obviously true and every story that doesn’t as evidence of media bias,” as I wrote at the time.
That trap has swallowed the Republican Party. Its leaders have long since decided that negative news coverage of any kind merely reflects innate hostility, and they accordingly trained themselves to ignore it.
In Trump’s version, the news media’s unfairness is a kind of syllogism. Any story that reflects poorly upon him is definitionally fake, a hoax, the product of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” His supporters have largely accepted this formulation. The Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz wrote a 2018 book, Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War Over the Truth, that revolves around the premise that critical stories about Trump inherently reflect media bias, rather than the reality that Trump tends to lie or commit scandals at a higher rate than traditional presidents.
Trump has made little effort to disguise his view that all news coverage can be categorized as either positive or fake. Speaking with reporters after his ban Friday, he said, “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.”
The First Amendment fortunately prevents Trump from operationalizing his premise that negative stories about his administration should not be legal. (The courts will almost certainly reverse his ban on Politico, CNN, and MS NOW, just as they did his earlier ban on the AP.)
But the Constitution does not prevent the GOP from acting as if negative coverage is inherently illegitimate. Reinforcing that belief, in fact, may be part of Trump’s motivation. He has turned his party into a personality cult that disregards all evidence of failure. This project requires constant reminders that the hated press cannot be trusted, and that Trump himself is the source of all truth.
A healthy political party would long ago have rebelled against Trump’s haphazard protectionism, his ill-thought lurch into a quagmire with Iran, his untrammeled corruption, and his embarrassing obsession with building extravagant monuments to himself. While Trump’s war on the media may be an effort to tamp down criticism of the Republican Party, that criticism has only intensified. The most profound effect of his attacks has been to seal off many Republican minds from the fresh air of critique and correction. But the GOP’s efforts to discredit the media, rather than protecting the party from its own governing failures, have only made those failures worse.
The post Trump’s Attacks on the Media Are Self-Defeating appeared first on The Atlantic.
