The Press...

Who’s Winning Trump’s War With the Press?

Assessing Year One.

By JACK SHAFER

The guy who said, “Never quarrel with a man who buys his ink by the barrel,” didn’t anticipate Donald Trump. Since becoming president, Trump has argued the news media to a stalemate thanks to the power of his alliance with the Fox News Network and his 44 million-follower Twitter account, which functions as one of the world’s largest printing presses. And the ink is free.

What makes Trump’s success at media-jamming so remarkable is that it coincides with a national press that has bird-dogged his every appointment, his every policy decision, his every political flip-flop, and of course, every ripple in the Russian investigation. The stronger the press gets, the greater Trump’s powers of deflection become, a spiral destined to take both to heaven or at the very least to hell.

Trump isn’t the first American president to square off against the press, obviously. President No. 2, John Adams, sought to silence his press critics with the Alien and Sedition Acts. President No. 18, Ulysses S. Grant, bawled in his second inaugural that he had been “the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history.” President No. 37, Richard Nixon, told his consigliere Henry Kissinger that the press was the enemy, and his White House put some of the day’s best journalists—Mary McGrory, Jack Anderson, Stanley Karnow, Tom Wicker, et al.—on an “enemies list.”

By defining the press as his prime adversary—not a foreign power or “terrorism” or an energy crisis, as previous presidents have—Trump has changed the way we view the press and the way the press views itself. For Trump, the struggle is Manichean, with him representing good and the press representing bad. In a recent tweet, he wrote, “Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative, with numerous forced retractions of untrue stories. Hence my use of Social Media, the only way to get the truth out. Much of Mainstream Meadia [sic] has become a joke!” At an August rally, he said journalists are “sick people,” “liars” who are fomenting “division.” In statement after statement, he and advisers like Steve Bannon have cast the national press, not the Democrats, as “the opposition party.” This trick of classification has paid steady dividends—it allows him to nullify every critical story as politically motivated and corrupt.

The press has accepted the role of the opposition party if not the designation. In press conferences and news stories, the national media give Trump the brand of guff we once heard coming from the firebrand wing of the Democratic Party. This is not to say reporters are in the tank for the Democrats—only that Trump’s confrontational style drives them to dig in and return fire. Trump loves to directly challenge reporters, to appear like the cruel nanny who spanks children for talking back and thereby goads them into more backtalk. Trump has arranged the dynamic in such a way that he appears both victim and victor in every clash.

Trump’s rows with journalists have made him America’s highest-profile press critic, a kind of malignant, self-interested ombudsman. Painting from his limited palate, he uses television addresses, interviews and tweets to depict stories he dislikes as “fakes” or “lies.” The effect has been maddening for journalists, who have exhausted themselves by writing counter-responses that say, “No! We’re on the level!”—the effect of which is to reinforce the impression among the president’s most loyal subjects that they are indeed the opposition party.

Being the most mistake-prone president in history hasn’t prevented Trump from capitalizing on the press corps’ recent errors. First he ripped ABC News’ Brian Ross for a botched piece that reported Russian collusion during the campaign and then he scalped CNN, his favorite whipping boy, for reporter Manu Raju’s monumental goof about the alleged special access that Donald Trump Jr. had been given to a WikiLeaks dump—a dump that was already in the public domain. No press slight has been too minor for Trump to howl about. When a tweet by the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel incorrectly captioned a photo from one of Trump’s rallies—only to 'fess up to the error shortly afterward—Trump went all Old Testament on journalists. “They are out of control,” Trump tweeted of the press. “Major lies written, then forced to be withdrawn after they are exposed...a stain on America!” Trump wants Weigel and Ross fired for their mistakes, and his press secretary has called for the sacking of ESPN anchor Jemele Hill for calling him a bigot.

These miscues in Trump coverage don’t necessarily mean that the press has a special vendetta against him, and one suspects he knows that. The making of mistakes cannot be divorced from the making of journalism. As historian David Greenberg notes in Republic of Spin, mistakes littered the coverage of the Watergate scandal. Greenberg writes:

Reporters, swept up in the chase, made mistakes that they failed to correct. In May 1973, Walter Cronkite opened the CBS Evening News with an item erroneously implicating a Bethesda bank run by Pat Buchanan’s brother in Watergate money-laundering. The AP falsely reported that [John] Ehrlichman was present at a key cover-up meeting among Nixon, Haldeman, and Dean. ABC’s Sam Donaldson wrongly asserted that James McCord had implicated departed aide Harry Dent in the White House sabotage efforts; Donaldson was forced to apologize. News outlets also overplayed trivial items, as the New York Times did by placing on the front page a three-column story about the possibility that Nixon’s campaign had received gambling money from the Bahamas. As [Washington] Post editor Robert Maynard conceded, there was “a lot of fast and loose stuff being printed.”

Additional Watergate screw-ups: The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “committed two critical mistakes” in their reporting on the scandal, as Craig Silverman showed in a 2011 Columbia Journalism Review piece.

I dredge up Watergate as a point of comparison not because it was especially flawed, but because it wasn’t. I dredge it up because, like the current Trump coverage, it was closely scrutinized and whenever the news is closely scrutinized, more errors will be discovered. That’s why the New York Times publishes more corrections than any other newspaper—because it’s the most heavily analyzed (and, of course, because the Times believes in error correction). Maybe somebody should explain to our presidential press critic that the news organizations he so disparages do the most aggressive policing of media miscues, especially if the miscues appear in a competing outlet.

The slickest of Trump’s media-jamming techniques, perfected during the campaign, is to bury damaging news stories in a blur of fuming tweets. This month he gave a tutorial on his method after Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) commented on news reports about Trump’s sexual harassment accusers, tweeting that Congress should investigate the charges against Trump and that he should resign. Following his standard script, Trump tweeted back, claiming (without evidence) that the Democrats were advancing the “false accusations and fabricated stories of women” because they had been unable to prove him colluding with Russia. Trump’s next tweet belittled Gillibrand directly, saying she “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them)”—leading some to conclude that he was calling her a prostitute.

Not only does Trump distract his critics with 280-character rampages, he dilutes whatever offense he has committed by committing new offenses. Writing in Axios, Jim VandeHei plotted out the standard Trump Twitter playbook: First he throws a Twitter bomb. Then “the outrage machine kicks in,” as the cable channels collect the outrage from both sides. As the prime-time broadcasts take the torch, VandeHei continues, the he said, she said wrangle dominates. In many cases, the precipitating news item—in this case, Trump’s accusers—sinks beneath under Trump’s histrionics.

Our current media standoff depends on Fox News Channel to transmit and amplify the Trump worldview. The network didn’t plump for Trump until he became his party’s likely nominee. But it was only after he became president that Fox enshrouded him in 24/7 protective cover, remaking itself indistinguishable from state-run media, as the New Republic’s Alex Shephard was early to observe. Fox sycophancy dominates its prime-time hours, as Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity praise Dear Leader, and the morning shift, when the hosts of Fox & Friends supply him with ample supplication. Trump completes this unvirtuous circle by tweeting back his approval. The ensuing feedback loop serves both the man and the network, making both seem larger than they really are.

The “Trump Effect,” Erik Wemple’s felicitous term for the media explosion lit by the president, has benefited the national press almost as much as it has Fox. The New York Times added 154,000 digital-only subscriptions in the last quarter, bringing its total digital subscriptions to about 2.5 million. Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, once seen as the Gray Lady’s knight in shining armor, is now selling his shares of the Times for a tidy profit. The Washington Post, bird-dogging the Trump administration and the Russia investigation with equal intensity, has seen its digital subscriptions pass the 1 million mark. Cable TV ratings and revenues have surged as well.

Trump has paid a terrible price for his war with the press, with first-year approval ratings sinking lower than the Kermadec Trench: Even though the economy grew like topsy in 2017, his favorable ratings are in the mid-30s. Past presidents would have tried to buttress these numbers by issuing feel-good but toothless executive orders or by wooing influential members of the mainstream media. Trump has done none of that, instead burrowing ever deeper into his Fox and Breitbart bunkers to better hear the sound of his own echo. Given what we learned about him this year, it’s hard to imagine him excavating his way out in 2018. This is a president who digs in only one direction.