On a recent edition of Mark Halperin’s Next Up podcast, the host delivered a critique of how U.S. President Donald Trump has outsmarted, circumvented, and bamboozled the dominant media over the past decade. What significance does this have as Trump’s time on the stage enters the last quarter? As the next election cycle ramps up, Trump’s legacy will force the 2028 candidates on both sides to strategize in a new age of media wars. More importantly, what has Trump done to change the dynamic? How did he break the old media?
TRUMP’S SAVVY APPROACH TO THE MEDIA ESTABLISHMENT
As Halperin asserts, Trump understands the business side of the media better than many who work in the media, including journalists, managing editors, and producers. If someone knows the inside of a business, its driving force, or ultimate goals, then getting ahead of the curve comes easily. As far back as Richard Nixon, possibly earlier, the mainstream media covered Republicans one way and Democrats another. Republican politicians claimed this for decades, but the corporate news companies diminished and dismissed this suggestion as paranoia or imaginary. Still, about half the country believed it.
In 2015, everything changed. Trump took on the news industry, and it helped him build a winning coalition. He had no problem going toe-to-toe with reporters, pointing out their bias, calling them horrible, or worse, accusing them of fake news, lying to get viewers, and making things up. Many Americans suspected this, and, in retrospect, had good reason to be suspicious of reporters, given the lengthy list of existing examples. For instance, the 2004 hit job Dan Rather and CBS News attempted to make on George W. Bush (CBS Apologises for ‘mistaken’ story of Bush’s military service) four years after the 2000 election eve report, when they tried to make an issue of his DUI in 1976 (Bush hit by drunk-driving revelation). These two stories only scratch the surface of how the dominant media has tilted in favour of Democratic politicians for decades. Trump knew this and consolidated a movement for his candidacy by using the fact that millions felt this way. Halperin points out one other interesting reinforcing event. If people look back twenty, thirty, or even forty years, Trump was a businessman and TV star; he received mostly favourable press. When he became a Republican politician, everything changed. Why? The national press does not like Republicans. And that says everything about news coverage in America over the past half-century or more. Trump understands this, stands up to it, and millions cheer.
ELECTIONS ARE TWO-ON-ONE CONTESTS
When Trump ran for president in 2015, he knew that to win, he not only had to overcome a Democratic opponent but the incumbent media. Democrats have benefited from a supportive narrative in the press for at least as long as Bill Clinton has been a prominent figure in politics. They received criticism, but as protagonists, they escaped total blame. As Halperin puts it, “They always got the benefit of the doubt, the framing (of a negative story) was softer, more patience when they made mistakes, more empathy.” Clinton, Obama, and Biden all luxuriated in the comfort that Democrats would support them, and most journalists were Democrats. Without that luxury, Trump had to think more deeply, plan more strategically, and figure out a way to overcome this challenge. He carefully studied what he had experienced and witnessed as part of NBC’s prime-time programming. This was an industry in decline, and he quickly identified areas that would weaken a news division’s financial standing in the years ahead and force it to compete with other news sources. Using Halperin’s criteria, there are four long-term effects of Trump’s media philosophy that have changed how presidents communicate, how the press covers their campaigns, and how they relate to the Washington press.
THE NATIONAL MEDIA HAS A LIBERAL BIAS
First, he learned to overcome the media’s liberal bias. He called out their one-sided reporting, drove up their negatives, and sowed seeds of doubt about what people already suspected as an inferior product. Additional sources rose, alternative media thrived, and he evened things out by convincing millions of skeptics that the media rigged their coverage to favour the Democrats. Anyone can download from a varied list of podcasters who either call themselves conservatives or seek to provide something different from what CNN, the big networks, or the newspapers of record offer.
MOST CORPORATE JOURNALISTS ARE ELITISTS
In the second place, he labelled them elitists. Trump pointed out their northeastern liberalism, which was out of touch and ignored middle America. These journalists cared little about those killed by illegal immigrants. That mattered to people in rural America. They ignored stories of how unfair trade practices were costing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of jobs. They tried to make excuses for allowing men to participate in women’s sports or teenage boys to use girls’ high school bathrooms. It boggled the mind to hear the defence for these policies, but journalists with the highest profiles would try to sell this to average Americans as acceptable or necessary. Many on the left call this populism and try to stain it with references to unsavoury characters from America’s past like Huey Long or Father Coughlin. The result was millions of new voters and millions who left their previous voting patterns to support the fresh voice on the block.
THE MEDIA USED A BROKEN BUSINESS MODEL
Most of the people running media empires did not understand the digital age. The door opened for new media because half the country was being overlooked. The big media corporations whistled through the graveyard under the assumption that they could keep focused on their liberal audience, rejecting new products, new approaches, or new formations. As they sat there rotting, conservative media took off in different configurations. Rush Limbaugh turned talk radio into a goldmine, new technology created inventive methods to reach audiences, and entertaining right-leaning personalities bypassed old media walls to appeal to younger folks.
LOST CREDIBILITY
Trump could not have attacked Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley (legendary news anchors for CBS and NBC from the 1950s to the 1980s) the way he went after the present generation of news reporters. The idea of taking on big print operations like the New York Times or Washington Post did not cross Ronald Reagan’s mind, despite their obvious bias against his conservative values. But the press has lost credibility with about half the population. Instead of correcting that problem, Big Media doubled down, using Trump to fuse their interests with a liberal audience. Things got worse. As Halperin observes, “Trump’s destruction of the weak media has gone over really well with tens of millions of people in this country. It’s put the media in a defensive crouch, and instead of listening to the critique and seeing the fact that they were being knocked down further, they just circled the wagons, hardened their attitudes, became even more ideological, more insular, more brittle. In their mind, every criticism they got for Trump was proof that they were doing something right, which in almost every case was exactly wrong.” As a result, tens of millions of people have turned to Fox News, platforms like Newsmax, Two Way, and others. If the media does not wake up to the changed conditions, they will continue to miss the opportunity to shift their bias, stop being liberal, halt the elitism, and embrace a model that fascinates all Americans, not just those in cities, those with university degrees, or those close to a coast. Trump has exposed all of this and continues to drive the industry with a volume and velocity that keeps them off balance and unsure.
Dave Redekop is a retired elementary resource teacher who worked part-time at the St. Catharines Courthouse as a Registrar until being appointed Executive Director at Redeemer Bible Church in October 2023. He has worked on political campaigns since high school and attended university in South Carolina for five years, earning a Master’s in American History with a specialization in Civil Rights. Dave loves reading biographies.
