Foto: Andrew Harnik
Battles between President Trump and a heavily left-leaning news media may continue but industry watchers say Trump has emerged as the clear winner, after years of vigorous scrapping with the press and attacking false or misleading news narratives.
“He knew there’d be blowback and that he’d get negative news coverage,” explained DePauw University Media Professor Jeff McCall. “But his news coverage has always been negative from the media anyway. So he really didn’t care about that.”
Recent media showdowns have ended with the defunding of taxpayer financed liberal media icons NPR and PBS, as well as settlements with news operations for biased coverage and even the cancellation of liberal late-night host Stephen Colbert.
“The traditional media have delegitimized themselves,” McCall pointed out, “with their lack of professionalism and their commitment to groupthink in their newsrooms.”
McCall estimates that Trump’s timing has worked to his advantage, coming as trust in media has been gravely wounded. “It’s important to note that media credibility had been in decline already. That decline had begun 15-20 years before Trump came down the escalator in 2016,” he said.
Some legacy news organizations have taken their succession of losses as a lesson. “There are some establishment media outlets that are getting the message and figuring out that they need report fairly and objectively and find a new balance,” McCall said. “The Washington Post has made some strides to try to say ‘we’re not going to be purely activist anymore.’”
That may not portend any cultural shift, however. The Post’s pledge to support “free markets and personal liberties” on its opinion pages brought an emotional exodus of some staffers.
McCall says such a failure to learn does not bode well, as the public has discovered alternatives to establishment media “they don’t have the credibility they once had. People are leaving to go listen to podcasters. The media have shot themselves in the foot and they’re paying the price for the activism that they created a long time ago.”