President Trump Sharpens Attacks on a Favorite Foe: The News Media

In declaring war on The Wall Street Journal over its coverage of his yearslong friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, President Trump tapped his supporters’ distrust of his favorite foe—the news media—in an effort to put down a mutiny within his base. It was a familiar move that might have been lifted straight from his playbook in the 2016 presidential campaign, but this is a very different moment. If Trump’s complaints about the media feel like a throwback to his first term, his actions toward the industry have gone much further than that. Over the past six months, Trump has undertaken a muscular and precise attack on the media’s pressure points. He has sought to dismantle Voice of America, the federally funded news agency that provides coverage to countries with limited press freedom, and persuaded his allies in Congress to cut funding for public broadcasting after decades of similar efforts sputtered out. “He is using the levers of government much more effectively as he has in other ways during this administration,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a lawyer who specializes in media regulations and is Senior Counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. “He has learned that he can enlist the Justice Department and an extremely compliant Federal Communications Commission chair to increase the leverage. And that is a big change.”