President Donald Trump is desperate for all-encompassing media attention, while simultaneously punishing the mainstream press for its negative coverage, a mix which, according to a new piece for The i Paper, is starting to blow up in his face.
In his latest column for the outlet on Sunday, veteran D.C. correspondent Simon Marks argued that “There is nothing Donald Trump enjoys more than firing fresh salvos in his battle against the mainstream media.” Within the last few days, he added, Trump “has lit the touchpaper in his most aggressive effort yet to demolish” the traditions around how press outlets are permitted to cover the president, with this “pliant” Justice Department launching a probe into the five major news networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox News, for supposedly violating antitrust laws when they suspended press pool coverage. That move came in solidarity with three other outlets Trump banned from the White House over their negative coverage of his presidency.
As a result of that boycott by the typical press pool, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “lavish state visit to Washington received little in the way of trailing US television crews, forcing even Trump-friendly right-wing media to scramble to find usable footage.” Trump also suffered an embarrassing coverage snafu when the opening ceremony for the White House helipad he commissioned was broadcast without sound, due to the lack of press pool equipment.
“It’s likely the probe into the networks’ possible breach of federal law will take time to advance,” Marks explained. “They will challenge even the requirement for them to submit documents to the investigation, arguing that their communications are covered by free-speech protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.”
He continued: “This creates a problem for the most media-hungry President the U.S. has ever had. Trump craves two things simultaneously: full coverage of his own attention-grabbing activities each day, but also the power to control the language and images used to describe his increasingly unpredictable administration.”
White House officials, he added, are known to have scrambled in response to the press pool boycott, making “a series of urgent calls to lower-level broadcasters, in an effort to try to persuade them to join a new-look TV pool, with plans to include several outlets seen as loyal to Trump’s MAGA vision.” At least one far-right network, Real America’s Voice TV, volunteered to share footage as part of that proposed initiative, but Marks argued that it was still “a far cry from the resources and expertise that the major networks have at their daily disposal.”
“Trump wants publicity to be on him around the clock. But he also aches to punish the major broadcasters when they paint him in an unfavourable light, and to terminate the key role they play in disseminating unvarnished coverage of daily events,” Marks concluded. “A fresh confrontation was inevitable, and Trump has now unleashed his Department of Justice Rottweilers in a seeming effort to spark one.”