The Press Remains the Enemy
The second Trump administration finds the news media’s appetite for adversarial inaccuracy undimmed.
President Donald Trump’s improbable honeymoon with the media may have coincidentally ended on the same day that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave her first briefing.
Not because of anything Leavitt said or did, though she clearly walks out to the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room ready to do battle. “We know for a fact that there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets about this president,” she told the assembled reporters, who may soon find themselves wishing for the halcyon days of Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kayleigh McEnany.
But for the first week or so of Trump’s second term, reporters were appreciative of how much he talked to them. After four years of former President Joe Biden making himself scarce in these settings and plenty of indications that former Vice President Kamala Harris would have been little different despite her relative youth, they were starved for access. Trump’s openness with the media, even if it came with executive orders some of them disagreed with or as he made pronouncements they disliked, was welcome.
That lasted a little over a week. Trump’s freeze on grant spending and ongoing campaign to increase deportations in order to curtail illegal immigration has the Washington press corps eager to move into a more adversarial mode. But they also risk falling into old habits.
Jim Acosta, one of Trump’s biggest media antagonists during the first term, announced his departure from CNN on the same day things started to heat up between the president and the news business. Acosta often made it sound as if his courageous coverage put him at risk of going to Gitmo rather than becoming the toast of the town. There may be a business risk to major media outlets alienating vast swathes of the country as potential readers or viewers, but the professional danger to their individual employees of becoming the next Sam Donaldson, Helen Thomas or, to be fair, Peter Doocy of a given administration are nonexistent.
There is nothing wrong with adversarial coverage. Every president should receive some, and such reporting on Biden should have begun in earnest before his debate performance made him an electoral liability to the Democratic Party. Trump is as deserving of scrutiny as anyone in public life and has received plenty since becoming a national political figure nearly a decade ago.
But the first order of business is figuring out what is really going on. At times during Trump’s first term, media outlets appeared so eager to speak truth to power it wasn’t clear that the who, what, when, and where had been nailed down yet—you know, the actual truth. There was one early Spicer briefing when some reporters appeared confused about the difference between a border-adjusted business tax and sweeping tariffs on Mexico. The confusion, naturally, was resolved by the Trump team “walking it back.”
Similar things may now be at work with the Trump NGO spending proposal and immigration logistics. “President Trump’s order freezing trillions of dollars in grants and loans seeks to eliminate all spending on programs that violate his partisan ideology,” the New York Times said. Some progressives protested that the newspaper was being too neutral, with the accompanying headline describing a “new fight over Trump’s vision for his government” rather than an ongoing threat to the constitutional order.
The merits or constitutional propriety of what Trump is attempting to do cannot be intelligently discussed while sowing confusion over what federal spending programs are truly covered and how taxpayers or beneficiaries will be affected.
Plainly, the hair-on-fire method of covering Trump has failed. It has engendered more skepticism of the outlets engaging in it than of the president, merely supplying readers and viewers already predisposed to be outraged by him with a steady stream of fresh reasons for their outrage.
Biden warned about the demise of the fact-checking industry in his farewell address. There is certainly no shortage of nonsense floating around on the internet, much of it generated by bad actors. At the same time, the gatekeepers haven’t proven reliable enough themselves. The contrasting headlines on the lab leak theory of Covid-19, once a conspiracy theory but now the consensus view in perfectly reputable circles, is one example. And a lot of these missteps were to Biden’s advantage, so naturally he would lament the fact-checkers’ departure.
There’s a reason Vice President J.D. Vance’s “I really don’t care, Margaret” was a mic drop moment of the kind Harris was hoping for in her debate with Trump. Somewhere, Spiro Agnew is saying, “I told you so.”
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