I’ve worked at CNN — and Donald Trump, you’re no Ted Turner.
The president of the United States, after banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House last weekend, launched his own 24-7 low-grade television channel on Monday. The inelegantly named “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” (a YouTube live stream) is a flop. So much for branding.
By Wednesday, the channel had lost nearly 95 percent of its viewership. Nothing to see there, apparently. The Daily Beast reported that viewers numbered just 427 at one point.
On Thursday morning, a federal judge ordered Trump to temporarily restore White House credentials for dozens of journalists, saying the removal of their press badges was probably done without adequate due process. Even so, several reporters said they were not allowed to enter the White House grounds. Since then, they have been able to reenter.
This unnecessary blowup, some might say “distraction,” seems to be further evidence that Trump is erratic, angry and out of control. He’s like a comic book antihero seemingly defined by his hatred of the very media that made him famous. (At least the Joker smiled.) Trump still holds the country and the world hostage to his impulses and baser instincts. Has he finally gone too far with the ban and some other decisions? So it seems, as some Republican candidates are breaking with him on Iran, and fewer Americans approve of him.
In a twist of fortune, his media ban backfired. Several other outlets, including ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC, joined the banned news organizations in solidarity and suspended pooled television coverage of White House events. On Monday, some outlets and wire services, including The Post, temporarily stopped publishing new images of presidential events in a show of support.
These are surely symbolically satisfying gestures, especially to journalists who cover him. But it’s unclear if — or how long — they matter, at least to Trump. The president once had a mutually beneficial relationship with the media, which helped him secure the presidency the first time around by giving him extraordinary access and what amounted to free advertising.
As Trump becomes more frustrated with his falling approval ratings and widespread ridicule, I suspect he wouldn’t mind overseeing a state-controlled media in the way Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping does. He has often expressed admiration for authoritarian leaders who maintain power in part through repression of free speech.
Maybe the past few days were an experiment to see what he could get away with. The president’s likely view is: So what if the media won’t cover me anymore? He has learned the art of direct communication with his public through social media and his own ironically named Truth Social. As a candidate, he successfully exploited the public’s lack of trust in journalists and magnified it through his constant condemnation of all unfavorable press coverage as “fake news.”
Though Trump isn’t the first president to battle the press, he has taken matters further in identifying the institution as an enemy that threatens national security.
I was privileged to cover both a Republican and a Democratic president — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — not as part of a press pool but as a Post opinion writer with decent access to the White House. Neither Bush nor Obama was treated gently by reporters, especially Bush, yet both spoke passionately about how crucial a free and unencumbered press is to democracy.
So-called patriots attack the media as though they’re part of some valiant, countercultural march toward freedom when servitude is what a state-controlled media promises. Do these patriots really want only government-approved news? This rather misses the point of holding the powerful accountable to protect the public, doesn’t it?
It’s sometimes difficult to discern who needs whom more — the politician or the reporter? It’s a give-and-take romance of sorts among adversaries. There’s no story without an interesting, consequential subject. Without the media, that same subject is either invisible to mainstream audiences or merely self-published. Trump got a taste of the latter when the networks declined to provide their usual pooled coverage of his anticipated reveal of a new helipad on the White House grounds.
In the everyday push-and-pull between president and press, mutual respect was once the norm. The arrangement depended on basic decency on both sides and a shared understanding of their symbiotic roles serving the public. Trump’s failure to uphold that understanding has brought us to this unfortunate standoff. It does no one good, especially the American people, for such hostility to be condoned or allowed. Ted Turner, though he started the 24-7 news coverage madness, understood this — and preached it.
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