What Trump Misunderstands About Modern Media
· The Atlantic
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
As modern American journalism began taking shape before the Civil War and newspapers were entering the world at staggering rates, the novelist Cornelius Mathews wondered at what point the profusion should stop, or whether it should stop at all. Because the press is the “palladium of liberty, and the more palladiums we have the freer we are,” perhaps everyone, everywhere, should just issue their very own daily “sheet” in which they can write of themselves and others “in a good pungent style.” The vision came as a joke in Mathews’s 1842 novel, The Career of Puffer Hopkins. Ponderous and mostly unreadable now, the book nonetheless divined an emerging truth of a world awash in information: Puffery and self-promotion would become a way of life.
Visit newsbetting.cv for more information.
A little more than 180 years later, everyone does, in fact, have the capacity to publish their own “sheet” online, not just once a day but as often as they like—and the president of the United States owns one of the platforms that makes this possible. In this new media landscape, the role of journalism remains contested. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump went on his Truth Social account to announce that three media outlets—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—would be banned from the White House grounds. A federal judge quickly blocked the move, and the three outlets have since regained access to the White House under a temporary restraining order while they seek a longer-term injunction (though CNN continues to be excluded from some press-pool duties, including presidential travel). The back-and-forth embodies a tension that has run through conservative politics since Richard Nixon’s time in office. The more empowered presidents have become to tell their stories directly to Americans, the more intolerant they’ve become of journalism’s ability to tell competing ones.
Writing for The Atlantic in 1973, David Wise captured this dynamic at work. He reported on how Nixon’s administration seethed with hostility toward the media, even as it enjoyed a power to command attention virtually unknown by any president before World War II. Television, Nixon knew, made it possible for the president to speak face-to-face with the public rather than needing to rely on intermediaries in the press. He learned the lesson in 1952, when he defended himself against financial-impropriety allegations in his “Checkers” speech, which saved his place on the presidential ticket with Dwight Eisenhower as well as his entire political career. The Republican Party had paid NBC $75,000 for that appearance, but presidents could go on television for free, and more or less at will. Responding to a question in 1971 about Nixon’s frequent requests for TV spots, then–NBC President Julian Goodman reportedly said, “Our attitude is the same as our attitude toward previous presidents: He can have any goddamn thing he wants.”
But that was not enough for Nixon and his circle, and from their moment of victory in 1968, they articulated a desire to fight back against unflattering coverage and commentary. As Wise detailed, one member of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s staff suggested on Election Night, “Why don’t we all get a member of the press and beat him up?” (As it happened, a Washington correspondent overheard the suggestion and reported on it.) In 1969, Agnew made a pair of speeches portraying the press as both deeply out of touch and guilty of misleading the public. Journalists, Agnew suggested, could be separated “from our society with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.” Later, in 1972, a Newsday columnist attended an advance film screening, during which he felt his hair being yanked by the person behind him with such force that his head hit the seat. The person behind him was Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, whom the columnist had profiled somewhat critically. The film being screened was The Godfather. For his part, Nixon himself joked soon after the moon landing that lunar rocks—feared to be contaminated with extraterrestrial germs—should be sent to members of the press.
The rhetoric and bullying was only the beginning. After the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the attorney general sought to block their publication (later that year, the “White House plumbers” would break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of finding ways to discredit Ellsberg). Also in 1971, the FBI began conducting an investigation of the CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, who was on Nixon’s infamous “enemy list” for his reporting. Federal agents attempted to dig up dirt on Schorr, and once their inquiries made the investigation public, White House officials falsely claimed to have been conducting a background check for a federal job for which Schorr had not applied. Such acts of intimidation, Richard Harris argued in The New Yorker in 1973, had actually succeeded in softening press coverage of the administration on a host of issues. It is no small irony, then, that it was less the hostility of journalists than the transgressions of Nixon and those in his circle that gave the press the story that would destroy his presidency.
More than 50 years on from Nixon’s resignation, Trump presents a curious case: As both an agent and a beneficiary of the fracturing media landscape, he is at once eager to both undermine the credibility of the press and bask in its plaudits. He built his political persona around persistent efforts to ruin the reputation of mainstream outlets, and under his administration, members of the press have been banished from the Pentagon and the White House. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s relentless drumbeat of scandal allows the president to operate with an impunity that Nixon would have envied. Neither the media nor its audience can possibly keep up. J. D. Vance may well have been right when he claimed in June, at the Nixon Library, that Watergate would be a “12-hour news story” today.
Trump has managed to realize the vision that Mathews had back in the 1840s—by being able to speak directly to the public without a middleman; by printing his own sheet, which he named Truth Social. But he still yearns to control every story on the platforms he can’t own. CNN reported that one of his top aides, Natalie Harp, showed him media clips that allegedly infuriated him the week before the ban on the three outlets. In this way, Trump remains locked in the TV-driven media environment that he helped destabilize. Even though the public’s trust of the press has drastically declined over the years, and even though Trump has a direct line to Americans via his robust social-media presence, he still demonstrates a “talismanic belief in the power of news coverage,” my colleague David A. Graham wrote last week.
Like Nixon, Trump desires control not just of his story but of the stories told about him. He wants to have all of the advantages of every medium—to print his own sheet, to star in the show, and to decide how the show will ultimately play out. Modern life doesn’t work that way, but there is little chance that he’ll stop trying.