Trump picking an easy target: the press

Skeptics say his war with the media won’t be easily won.

Just about every president engages in testy disputes with the press. The difference between the first 44 presidents and President Donald Trump, however, is not many of his predecessors picked fights their first week in office.

From Trump denouncing reporters on Jan. 21 as “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth” to White House press secretary Sean Spicer warning that, “We’re going to hold the press accountable,” the White House swiftly signaled the hostile relationship between reporters and Trump during last year’s campaign is not going away.

Just last Wednesday in an interview with the New York Times, White House adviser Steve Bannon called the press the “opposition party” to the Trump administration, saying “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut.”

Those close to Trump, convinced the press bashing plays well with their most loyal voters, relish the opportunity of taking on the media. A Gallup poll last September showed 32 percent of Americans have a good deal of trust in the press compared to 54 percent in 2003.

“He’s winning it so far,” said Barry Bennett, a Republican consultant in Washington and former senior campaign adviser to Trump. “The media has backed itself in a corner where the public thinks it’s out to get him. So even legitimate criticism is seen as a partisan attack. He didn’t create that. The media did.”

Yet skeptics say Trump is in a fight he ultimately can’t win.

“As a former flack, if you’re not clashing with reporters once in a while, you are doing your job wrong,” said James Manley, press secretary to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. “They are taking it to a whole new level and I am very concerned the impact it is having on the political process and the country as a whole.”

Presidents have had legendary quarrels with the press. Although John F. Kennedy fostered the friendship of influential columnists, he also ordered the CIA to wiretap the telephone of Hanson Baldwin, the national security reporter for the New York Times.

President Richard Nixon had a running feud with reporters, publicly saying they wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore” after he lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race.

As president in 1969, he ordered wiretaps placed on the phones of Hedrick Smith, the former Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, and three other reporters in an effort to discover the source of national security leaks.

But the early ferocity of the exchanges between Trump and reporters is astonishing, in part fueled by the startling changes in the news industry. During Nixon’s presidency, the news media was dominated by the three major broadcast networks and newspapers such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.

Today, the news cycle is 24 hours every day with reporters updating websites and TV broadcasts. Virtually every reporter has a Twitter account and sometimes in a rush to break news, their tweets get them into trouble.

“The problem is you can say things on Twitter you could never get in a paper or in TV,” Bennett said. “You can call the president a liar on Twitter. In history of journalism that is a no-no.”

On Trump’s first night in the White House, a Time Magazine reporter on pool duty at the White House incorrectly tweeted that a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been removed from the Oval Office. Within a couple of hours, the reporter realized the mistake, tweeted a correction and apologized.

That did not stop Kellyanne Conway from complaining on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday about what she called a “falsehood” by the reporter.

Spicer made an effort to tone done the hostility when he said “our intention is never to lie to you. You’re in the same boat: I mean, there are times when you guys tweet something out or write a story and you publish a correction. That doesn’t mean that you were intentionally trying to deceive readers and the American people, does it? And I think that we should be afforded the same opportunity.”

Jessica Towhey, who served as press secretary to former House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester, said Trump may win points “right now” by shaming the press.

But in the end, she said,

“Nobody is going to win in that type of fight.”

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