It’s become a favored explanation for his sagging poll numbers: Trump, for one, has noticed the negativity of his coverage. "Trump has freed journalists from the handcuffs of false equivalence," says Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources.
The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon. It’s a common criticism of political reporting that it’s hampered by a faux-evenhandedness - if one side says the sky is blue and the other side says it’s orange, then the headline will be "Opinions on Color of Sky Differ." But that hasn’t happened this year. If Jeb Bush had banned the Washington Post from covering his campaign over charges of bias, the paper would treat it as an existential threat. If Ted Cruz had been the GOP’s standard-bearer, he, like Trump, would have kooks at his rallies, but it would be seen as a cheap shot for the New York Times to record the worst of their vitriol and send it ricocheting across Facebook. If Marco Rubio had won the Republican nomination, he might have lied in some speeches, but CNN’s chyrons would have stayed dull. There are rules within traditional political reporting operations about how you cover presidential candidates. Increasingly, the press doesn’t even pretend to treat Trump like a normal candidate: CNN’s chyrons fact-check him in real time the Washington Post reacted to being banned from Trump with a shrug BuzzFeed News published a memo telling reporters it was fine to call Trump "a mendacious racist" on social media the New York Times published a viral video in which it simply quoted the most vile statements it heard from Trump’s supporters. He still gets wall-to-wall coverage, but that coverage is overwhelmingly negative. And it was, arguably, the media’s wall-to-wall coverage of his every utterance that powered his victory in the Republican primary.īut slowly, surely, the media has turned on Trump.
It was, reportedly, his anger at being dismissed by political pundits that led him to run for president in the first place. There is a case to be made that the media created Donald Trump.