This week has been an abysmal one for establishment media, but the President Trump-obsessed punditry will insist that the media’s flaws are a nonstory compared to the president they are covering. But it’s the media that created Trump, and they will be here long after he leaves office.
The media created Trump before his presidential run, with NBC’s Jeff Zucker (now at CNN) bringing him to the network for The Apprentice, which cemented the idea of Trump the businessman into American culture. And the media boosted Trump to the presidency, openly promoting him against other Republicans in the primary, hoping he would lose to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The New York Times reported in March that Trump had received nearly $2 billion worth of “free media,” as opposed to ad spending. Trump was given over six times more free media than his nearest competitor, Ted Cruz, while he sat behind Chris Christie and John Kasich in ad spending.
Trump will be gone in either 2021 or 2025. But people such as Zucker, who gave the Trump campaign debate advice ahead of a CNN Republican debate and wanted to give Trump his own CNN show, will still be around. So, too, will Jake Tapper, who tried to steer Republican Sean Parnell away from taking on a vulnerable Democrat in a Pennsylvania House seat and then denied it.
The media book club will also still be around, with reporters making fools of themselves in order to sell their upcoming books to their colleagues. So will outlets such as the Atlantic, dropping tabloid level stories with anonymous sourcing and refusing to put a name on the record because they might get some mean tweets sent their way. So will the rest of Zucker’s CNN, threatening to expose the identities of private citizens unless they grovel at the network’s feet.
Trump could be out of the White House by January. But a media that made it their mission to defeat John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 will simply move on to the “unique threat” posed by the next Republican.
None of the problems of the “Trump era” will disappear with Trump — because those problems were never really about Trump in the first place. Whether it’s turning the presidency into a celebrity office (Barack Obama) or the lack of civility (such as smearing Romney), these problems preceded Trump, and if our media stays on its current course, they will continue long after he’s gone.
