Why the Media is So Hard on President Trump
This morning, President Trump’s frustration with the press reared its head again on Twitter. Observing that “Fake News” is at an all time high, the President wondered when he would be receiving an apology.
He shouldn’t hold his breath.
It’s not surprising that Mr. Trump is angry. There’s little doubt that the media coverage of his Presidency has been overwhelmingly negative. Some of it has been unfair. Some of it just comes with the job. But, much of it is of his own making.
The media is first and foremost biased towards controversy. Mr. Trump’s tendency to infuse the news with dramatic twists and turns — shocking tweets, summary firings, and outlandish statements that fuel outrage — are worthy of a reality show. Controversy and outrage sells and the Donald Trump business is gangbusters.
Clash of Cultures
The media has always had some degree of bias against Republicans. Newsrooms are populated with highly educated urbanites holding degrees from elite universities. It gives them a vastly different worldview from the rural middle Americans that fill the ranks of the Republican Party. Although many journalists make an effort to be fair, this often shows through in their reporting nonetheless. But this is only a small part of it.
With Donald Trump it’s something different. It’s far more than the normal hostility towards a conservative approach to government. There is, as Ben Wittes of the Bookings Institution has put it, a fundamental skepticism among much of institutional Washington that the President takes his oath of office seriously and that he is even capable of executing it faithfully.
Having never held any previous elected office, President Trump is uniquely unacquainted with the mechanics of government. His knowledge of the basic elements of public policy is often lacking or severely distorted. The media feel it’s their job to to point this out, sometimes unfairly so.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf Effect
Mostly, it’s President Trump’s hyperbolic and often counterfactual style that creates an adversarial relationship with news media. Many politicians are perfidious to some degree, but they’re usually more sneaky about it. The difference with President Trump is that his factually incorrect statements are often so easily disproven. Donald Trump is a full employment program for media fact checkers.
Take the question of whether Trump has ever met Vladimir Putin. Before Russia became an issue in the campaign, Trump bragged of a close relationship with the Russian President. After it became a liability, he claimed to not know him at all. One of these statements cannot be true — perhaps only he and President Putin know which.
Where most politicians would qualify and reframe their earlier statements, Trump discards them altogether and says something completely different. His long track record of mistating facts, either deliberately or out of ignorance, draws a substantially greater degree of scrutiny onto everything he says. He lies so routinely that reporters often assume that he is not telling the truth until proven otherwise.
President Trump was elected less for his experience in governing than his ability to channel the frustrations of a lot of ordinary Americans. However, the media is holding him to a different set of standards than his supporters: the veracity of his statements, his skills in governing, and the perceived wisdom of his policies. Much of this is subjective, and it’s fair to say that the media has tended to air towards the dimmest possible view. As I wrote in an essay late last year, journalists have taken a uniquely adversarial approach to covering Trump:
“[a]n alien descending to earth would be hard pressed not to conclude that mainstream news outlets were pulling for Hillary to win. The near universal disdain for Trump on editorial pages and front pages alike is hard to miss. Reflecting the view of many in the news business, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote back in August that when journalists believe that Trump is a danger to the Republic ‘you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.’ Carolyn Ryan, *The New York Times’s* senior editor for politics, told Rutenberg that Trump’s candidacy is ‘extraordinary and precedent-shattering…to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous with readers.’ Rutenberg concludes that ‘[i]t may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness.’”
The simplest way to explain all this to a child is the fable of the boy who cried wolf. President Trump has so often been untruthful, that now the media tends to not believe him even when he is telling the truth.
