In his second term, Trump has continued his habit of chiding the media but has added to it lawsuits, investigation threats, and attempts to cut thousands of journalism jobs at U.S.-funded news outlets.
“No matter how big the win is, the press will not give me credit for it,” Trump complained to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday. “If I got the biggest win in history, if I got [China to] pay us trillions and trillions of dollars, they give us anything we want, the press will say, ‘Trump, he just had a terrible defeat.’”
As he did in his first term, Trump will skip Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which this year will also not feature a comedian as organizers promise a more “earnest” event reflecting the new reality.
But while Trump’s nonattendance at the dinner follows the pattern of the president’s first term, his battles with the press have increased in tenor since reassuming the Oval Office.
Trump started off by kicking the Associated Press off of Air Force One and out of the Oval Office over its refusal to adhere to his renaming of the Gulf of America. His administration lost an ensuing legal battle, and responded by removing the news wire spot entirely from the daily White House press pool.
Both moves upset the WHCA, which previously controlled White House press access and released a letter signed by 40 news outlets demanding the Associated Press’s reinstatement.
Instead, Trump escalated by looking to take control of seating assignments in the White House press briefing room, which are coveted because reporters sitting in the first few rows are much more likely to get called on by the press secretary than those in the back rows.
Where he’s been able, Trump has also threatened the employment status of journalists, attempting to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs the taxpayer-funded Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Network. If successful, that move would impact more than 3,500 journalists and media workers, according to Reporters Without Borders.
“The day-to-day chaos of the American political news cycle can make it hard to fully take stock of the seismic shifts that are happening. But when you step back and look at the whole picture, the pattern of blows to press freedom is quite clear,” RWB Executive Director Clayton Weimers said. “We will continue to call out these assaults against the press and use every means at our disposal to fight back against them.”
The group also said more than 180 U.S. radio stations could be shut down if public media funding is eliminated.
Tensions between the press and the president have existed for decades. Trump’s complaint that the press wouldn’t celebrate a great trade deal echoes the words of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who quipped in the 1960s that if he walked on water, the afternoon headline would be “President Can’t Swim.”
Still, WHCA President Eugene Daniels says that Trump is taking things to another level, lamenting that the events of his second term are “a new normal that no one asked for.“
Trump’s team sees things differently.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt argues that her boss is actually expanding transparency by allowing nontraditional news outlets access to the White House. She points to Trump’s almost daily interactions with the press, frequent social media posts, and welcoming of potentially hostile interviews as evidence that he’s revolutionizing the way presidents communicate with the public.
“We always want to respect the First Amendment,” she said in an interview with Axios, “but I don’t wrestle with the fact that we’re infringing on the First Amendment in any way, because I don’t believe that we are.”
Jeffrey McCall, a professor of political communications at DePauw University, says that Trump is being much more calculated in his interactions with the media than he was in his first term.
“Trump still makes unscripted shots at reporters and certain news outlets, but there are broader anti-press strategies being implemented,” he said. “The management of the press pool is quite calculated, including providing more White House access for non-traditional media.”
What McCall also argues — and Trump likely knows as well — is that the press has relatively little leverage to push back.
“The establishment press still wants to fight the Trump administration, but there are only so many levers these news outlets can pull,” McCall said. “The lawsuits help around the fringes, but the White House still has broad leeway in terms of what outlets get access.”
Republicans have for years pointed to polling that shows trust in news media at historic lows. Meanwhile, changes in technology mean that most voters can get news from an extraordinarily wide range of sources rather than having to rely on local newspapers or cable news networks.
“The credibility of the media is so diminished these days that the White House can belittle and bully the press and have the general support of Trump voters,” McCall added. “Much of the press complaining about Trump and his media relations comes off as looking self-righteous and entitled.”
Journalists have rallied to support each other, with groups like the WHCA issuing statements calling out Trump’s actions as an attack on press freedom. Another advocacy group, the Society of Professional Journalists, awarded the Associated Press its Ethics in Journalism Award this year.
“In the face of direct political pressure, the Associated Press held the line for ethical journalism,” SPJ national president Emily Bloch said. “Rather than compromise its editorial independence by backing down, AP stayed true to its principles and continued serving the public with unbiased reporting. That is the very definition of ethical courage.”
But how far that courage carries the Associated Press or any other news outlets remains to be seen. Media outlets have won a handful of court cases against the Trump administration, but it is unclear to what extent that will deter the president from continuing to step up conflicts with the press.
Another, lesser-noticed trend is that Trump has mostly eschewed the briefing room this term in favor of meeting with a smaller group of reporters inside the Oval Office. The Trump White House now controls who is included in that group, though so far it has left many legacy outlets in the rotation.
For those journalists still taking it to Trump on a daily basis, the president has continued his first-term habit of calling out what he sees as biased coverage.
White House turbulence seeps into second Trump term
When Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked Thursday about China dismissing claims it was in trade talks with the U.S., Trump rejected the report — and Mason.
“They had meetings this morning,” Trump said, refusing to identify who “they” were. “And we’ve been meeting with China. And so I think you have, Jeff, as usual, I think you have your reporting wrong.”
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
