The Tug-of-War Between Trump and the Press

Eight days ago, David Bauder, a media reporter at the Associated Press, published a story listing the by now familiar ways in which Trump and his administration have put journalists “on their heels” after only two months back in power, checking off a barrage of lawsuits and rhetorical attacks, the “newly aggressive” posture of the Federal Communications Commission, the gutting of the US-funded overseas broadcaster Voice of America, and the White House banning Bauder’s own shop, the AP, from events after it refused to start referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in the stenographic way Trump would like. Bauder also noted the (equally familiar) right-wing charges that the mainstream press is no longer widely trusted or even that widely consumed, among other sharp challenges. As last week unfolded, we were assigned more bleak reading (and listening). On an episode of the New York Times’ influential podcast The Daily, Jim Rutenberg outlined how Trump is not only undermining the press, but circumventing it, as alternative right-wing outlets and podcast bros furnish him with unprecedented levels of “media cheerleading and support.” (The episode’s title: “Nixon Dreamed of Breaking the Media. Trump Is Doing It.”) In Vanity Fair, Joel Simon situated Trump’s efforts to bend the media to his will in the wider context of growing authoritarianism in the US, and argued that “anticipatory obedience is rife” on the part of outlets from the Washington Post to ABC News.