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February 2017

The remarkable inconsistency of Trump’s attacks on the media

President Donald Trump just can't get his story straight.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he accused the news media of widespread fabrication, claiming without evidence that “they have no sources; they just make 'em up when there are none.” The charge is wholly incompatible with his assertions, at other times (or on the same day), that U.S. intelligence officials are leaking classified information to reporters — and must be ferreted out. Which is it? Are the unidentified intelligence sources cited in reports by The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and others invented by “dishonest” journalists? Or are they real people, providing real information, who need to be stopped? Both of the president's claims cannot be true.

It seems clear which one President Trump actually believes: He speaks and tweets so frequently about plugging leaks that his consternation appears genuine.

Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of low-road, New York Post-style gossip: “Page Six reporter.” Whether the New England-bred spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip.

He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, President Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

Is the Media Too Tough on Donald Trump? More Than Half of Americans Think So

Just over half of Americans think the media’s coverage of President Donald Trump has been too critical, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

While 51% rate the media as too critical of President Trump since the presidential election, 41% say the coverage has been fair and objective, while 6% say the media hasn't been critical enough. It isn’t clear what role Mr. Trump’s barrage of attacks on the fairness and credibility of the press has played in shaping the majority’s opinion that coverage of his administration has been too negative. A majority of those polled, some 53%, also believes that the news media have exaggerated problems in the Trump administration. Some 45% say that is not the case.

Think the Internet Is Polarized? Just Look at the FCC These Days

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s rise from relative obscurity to big headlines corresponds not just with the Trump’s arrival in Washington, but with the ever-greater centrality of the internet to American life, political and otherwise.

From its start in 1934, the FCC has played a crucial role in determining how Americans communicate and gather information. But for most of its existence, it’s been a boring, technocratic agency tasked with granting broadcast licenses and divvying up the wireless spectrum. It occasionally waded into controversies like obscenity laws, media consolidation rules, or the Fairness Doctrine, but even when decisions followed party lines, they rarely became political firestorms. But these days, the FCC has grown increasingly polarized—and polarizing. The agency that regulates the internet is becoming as sharply divided as the internet itself. You can’t blame petty politics alone for the mess the FCC finds itself in. Debates over net neutrality and cable boxes stem from an ideological shift in Washington. In earlier days, it was “good regulation versus bad regulation,” says Chris Lewis, vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. Now it’s “more regulation versus less regulation.” The Trump administration has signaled a hard shift in the direction of deregulation, though it may occasionally come down in favor of government intervention when politically desirable.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s outlook is clearly in line with administration. But he, like the president and Congress, have an obligation to the public, not just to the Republican base or to free market ideology. No one, not even the telecommunication industry, is well served by regulations that yo-yo back and forth as the political seasons change. The internet, at least in this case, should really be above politics.

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