Amid the chaos of the Trump administration, an over-arching story has been that once-antagonistic relationships with the president have softened — from the tech industry and many of its billionaires to the news media, with several outlets accused of “bending the knee” to Donald Trump in an effort to smooth relations and ensure access.
Four weeks into President Trump’s second term, the mainstream press has learned — or at least, should have learned — a sobering lesson: When it comes to burying the hatchet with Trump and his most ardent fans, for journalistic institutions he has dubbed “the enemy of the people,” there’s simply no mollifying MAGA.
News organizations seem determined to recognize this the hard way, as one after another has taken steps perceived by Trump critics as acts of compliance, if not obeisance. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski joined many of the tech CEOs in making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago shortly after the election. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owners spiked campaign endorsements of Kamala Harris, leading to staff resignations and defections.
Disney settled a lawsuit Trump brought against ABC News over a comment by George Stephanopoulos. CNN regularly populates its nightly panels with Scott Jennings and other pro-Trump pundits to defend him no matter what the issue, alienating many of the progressives who might otherwise watch the ratings-challenged network. CBS News staffers also continue to fret that their parent company, Paramount, will settle a Trump lawsuit against “60 Minutes,” not because of its legal merit, but to remove a potential impediment to the company’s merger with Skydance Media.
But if the press expected a more conciliatory posture to yield some sort of reciprocation from Trump and his most loyal minions, they have missed — or perhaps chosen to overlook — a fundamental part of the Trump brand: Anything that questions him, beginning with the press, must be diminished and discredited.
In recent weeks, Trump’s media targets have veered far and wide, including outlets hardly known as wild-eyed bastions of liberalism, from the editorial pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office to outrage over government officials’ subscriptions to Politico. By reviving complaints against “60 Minutes,” Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, appears to be using the pending merger as leverage to help procure a favorable outcome for his boss.
No stranger to punching down, Trump has told a CNN reporter her network has “no credibility,” belittled Huffpost and called for a Washington Post columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson, to be fired. A Post spokesperson responded by saying the newspaper “stands behind Gene — just as it stands behind all journalists and news organizations dedicated to independent coverage and a free press,” although after owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to scotch the Harris endorsement and attend Trump’s inauguration, cynics might conclude that comes with an asterisk.
The main point remains that for Trump, and his social-media-warrior supporters who regularly level bad-faith arguments against the press, “independent coverage” is written off as “fake news,” especially when it challenges Trump’s actions or agenda. For those reasons, journalism experts see attempts by traditional news outlets to mend fences with Trump by appeasing him, or broaden their reach among his supporters, as simply misguided.
The futility of chasing Trump fans
Axios, for its part, issued a statement that it will adopt Trump’s “Gulf of America” designation for the Gulf of Mexico — a concession that not surprisingly triggered derision from progressive voices across social media, accusing the political site of cowardice and capitulation to preserve access.
“It turns out to be such a bad business decision,” journalism critic Jeff Jarvis, a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet,” told TheWrap. “What’s true of many of these outlets is they think they can somehow attract Trump fans, and that’s never going to happen.”
Instead, Jarvis noted, those organizations often alienate the audiences that they have, whether that’s outcry over newspapers withholding endorsements or trackable dips in viewership, as seen with “Morning Joe” ratings after its hosts’ visit to the then-president-elect.
“In the process of sucking up to the Trumpists, they lose their loyal readers,” he said.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who writes the popular PressThink blog, struck a similar note, pointing to CNN’s efforts to balance its panels with Trump supporters like Jennings, just as the network did during the 2016 campaign with Jeffrey Lord and others.
“Almost everybody could see” that wouldn’t work, Rosen told TheWrap. “Nobody thought CNN would become a place where the whole family, including crazy Uncle Bill, would get together and watch the news.”
Rosen also draws a distinction between “media” and “journalism,” noting that the corporate parents of news organizations, like Paramount and Disney, have priorities — from regulatory concerns to tax rates — separate from protecting and preserving the integrity of their news divisions.
“For the media’s sake, making sure that you’re good with the powers that be is necessary,” Rosen said. “When you’re a media company, you have to act in a certain way, because you need them for very many things. But the press is different.”
Those operations, meanwhile, can only appease Trump for so long. That’s because in Trump World, the inherently adversarial nature of the relationship between politicians and the press gets automatically viewed as nefarious. Criticism or attempts to hold the administration to account must harbor unseen motives and are by definition unfair.
Moreover, Trump’s brand rests in part on his animosity toward the press, who, after decades of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News telling conservative audiences as much, don’t believe mainstream journalists can be impartial brokers.
Giving up on the “Costco strategy”
While there are no clear answers for dealing with an environment where traditional journalism has been turned on its head, the most logical reaction would appear to hinge on recognizing and acknowledging the extent to which the world has changed. To Jarvis, that includes shedding the notion of appealing to everyone, the “Costco strategy,” and adapting to the age of the narrower niche.
“My constant theory is that we are witnessing the death of mass media,” he said, adding that traditional outlets are “clinging to the myth that they believed that they served everybody, when they never did, or they had everyone’s attention, when they never did.”
Toward that end, Rosen said reporters must re-think their faith in the importance and value of access, re-upping his suggestion from Trump’s first term — namely, advising major news operations to send interns to the White House briefings given the lack of genuine news there. While that doesn’t represent much of a solution, in a time of more limited journalistic resources as news outlets reduce staff, his argument is that it could free up senior reporters to focus on investigative stories and deeper dives into what’s really happening.
If that angers Trump’s base, this reasoning goes, so be it. Attracting people predisposed to dismiss what you tell them as “fake news” is, in essence, a fool’s errand.
“Even before he kicks you out of the press room, leave it,” Jarvis said.
Was there anything scandalous, for example, or even untoward, about government employees subscribing to a data-driven service provided by Politico? No. Yet the explanation didn’t matter to the MAGA faithful who took to social media describing such expenditures as payoffs to the media.
Rosen conceded the situation is frustrating, since there’s no journalistic road map for addressing a vast portion of the potential audience that rejects facts and truth. A place to start, though, would involve new ways of thinking, from realizing the press’ traditional role as gatekeepers of information has been shattered by social media, and accepting that the ideal of widely shared public discourse no longer exists.
“We don’t see creative leaps in the practice of journalism, and we certainly need them, and need them now,” Rosen said. “When people just won’t believe what you have demonstrated is true, you can’t just keep on doing what you’ve been doing.”
