Trump’s Attacks on the Media Are Self-Defeating
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.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theatlantic.com — the content belongs to The Atlantic.
