THE Trump White House is not simply tearing up the old political playbook, it is writing a completely new one. The president’s war with the media is astonishing pundits. Virtually every occupant of the Oval Office has gone to often considerable lengths to “get the media right”. Announcements were timed to hit prime news spots. Good news was used to conceal bad news. White House correspondents, newspaper editors and media chiefs were schmoozed on a regular basis. Media strategies were planned many months in advance. Indeed it sometimes seemed as if the need to keep the media on side was the prime consideration of every administration.
The media establishment is thus in shock at what has happened since Donald Trump won the White House. Indeed it spent much of the primaries and then the presidential campaign rubbishing him. It could not bring itself to believe that such a complete outsider, who had refused to play by the normal rules and spent much of his time slinging insults, had actually become the US president. There was however still a feeling that once he came to power Trump would drop the act that won him the presidency and start to behave like a regular politician, guided by the more experienced people he had gathered around him. Yet the media’s shock has been compounded by the fact that Trump has actually increased his campaign against press and broadcasters, accusing them of “Fake News”. There was disbelief when some correspondents found themselves banned last week from a White House briefing, either because they or their media organization were considered by the administration to be biased.
Polls show that the majority of Republican voters are enthusiastic about the Trump assault on the press. Even some Democrats, just over 20 percent appear to approve as well. There are of course far bigger issues here than a tussle between a president and a media that almost exclusively hates him. The Fourth Estate, as the media likes to be known, has long held an important role in the United States, reporting and commenting on the political events of the day. Almost invariably media outlets were biased, depending on the outlook of their owners. But this did not really matter because these prejudices were understood by the public. They would consume the media that represented their own point of view and look at rivals when they wanted to know what the opposition was thinking.
However the institutionalization of the role of the US media meant that they became part of the political establishment. Whatever their protests about objectivity, they were part of political game. And arguably since the Washington Post’s Watergate reporting destroyed President Richard Nixon, the media has considered itself far more powerful than it deserved.
Trump’s contemptuous treatment of the media is part and parcel of his disdain for the Washington political establishment, so completely represented by Hilary Clinton. He has taken away the media’s mojo and the media is vowing revenge. Trump can laugh at this. He won the White House in the teeth of the opposition and ridicule of virtually the entire media. And he has a further reason to smile. Now when big scandals are broken by press and broadcasters, he can represent them as part of a vicious media campaign to destroy him because he is not prepared to kowtow to them.
