The feud between the Trump Administration and the Associated Press, caused by the latter's refusal to call the “Gulf of America” by its new name, is heating up! The A.P. has been banned from White House events due to its willful dissemination of what the Trump Administration regards as “misinformation,” and the legacy media is outraged!
Any denial of access is potentially catastrophic for a media organization, of course, but the kicker is that the leftist media (let's call a spade a spade) is being accused of spreading “misinformation” – precisely the alleged infraction that caused countless conservatives and other dissidents to be silenced in the dystopian Biden era. Ouch! That's a little like calling a lefty a “fascist,” which, while it might often be painfully close to the truth, serves mainly to overload a progressive's mental circuits and send him into fits of apoplexy/self-justification. Not surprisingly, the fate of the A.P. is doing exactly that to the supposedly rational gentlemen (and ladies) of the Fourth Estate.
In fact, these venerable pressmen (presspeople?) are so flummoxed by Trump's masterstroke that there's talk in legacy media circles of "collective action" against the Trump Administration, meaning a media blackout of presidential and White House events. The theory is that the Trump Administration needs coverage in the mainstream media to reach independent and swing voters and thus to sustain public support. Threatened with a media boycott, therefore, Trump would surely buckle under the pressure. Well, maybe, but several flaws in this leftist logic would make any press boycott of Trump a potential godsend to...Trump himself.
First, the reach of the mainstream media has never been shorter, which is to say that viewership and readership is in terminal decline for many mainstream news networks, newspapers, and other media outlets. Public confidence in these institutions is at an all-time low, and thus, public interest in what they have to say is nearing the vanishing point. Ergo, if CNN, say, stops covering Trump, but no one watches CNN anyway, would anyone notice or care? Heck, no!
Second, as much as Trump may need media coverage to sustain public confidence in his bold and aggressive policies, the legacy media may need Trump even more as a boogeyman, if nothing else. The only appreciable gains in viewership and readership that the legacy media has notched in recent years were during Trump's first term and during the recent presidential election campaign – and were caused, in both cases, mainly by energized Trump-hating liberals tuning in and buying newspapers to indulge their runaway TDS. Much as the mainstream media loathes Trump, therefore, one can argue that it needs him as a news story now more than ever. In fact, without 24/7 Trump denigration, the legacy media could be up the proverbial creek without a paddle! Boycotting Trump, therefore, could be the end of the mainstream media as we know it.
The third and final reason a media boycott of the White House and presidential events would be potentially self-defeating is that, since the legacy media's coverage of Trump is so relentlessly and stridently anti-Trump, one can argue that less coverage of Trump would primarily benefit...Trump. Donald Trump's nemesis over the last ten years, in many ways, hasn't been Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or even the Democratic Party, so much as it's been the “establishment” as a whole and the voice of the establishment is the media. The interconnections, institutionally and personally, between the political elite in D.C., the corporate elite, the Hollywood elite, and the journalistic elite, are legion. This explains why the media bias against the conservative populism of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement has been so pronounced and why it has grown steadily over the years. Even though relatively few people may be listening to these legacy media outlets nowadays, the truth is that they still have enormous influence over our political discourse. If the sheer volume of this critical coverage of the Trump Administration could be reduced, essentially because the media itself made a collective decision to talk about something or someone else, then the biggest beneficiary could easily be Donald Trump. And don't think for a second that Trump and his closest advisors haven't thought of this. Undoubtedly, they have.
I say, therefore, with respect to the mainstream media's proposed boycott of the Trump Administration: bring it on!!! I have long questioned the wisdom of Republicans and conservatives furnishing constant and easy access to themselves to a media establishment that increasingly exists for no other purpose than to denigrate and destroy them and all they stand for. Let's accelerate the media's decline into irrelevance, then, by supporting its self-defeating boycott! It could be the best thing to happen to America since, oh, November 5th, 2024...
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmakers show on WLEA/WYSL.
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