Edward Helmore’s assertion in The Guardian that Trump is “winning” against the U.S. media is as vague as it is wrong. Helmore points to CBS’s $16 million payment to the president — essentially a bribe to settle a sham lawsuit and allow the FCC to approve its parent company’s merger — alongside the curtailment of the opinion pages of WaPo and the LA Times by their billionaire owners. Those moves are bad and dangerous. But in addition to painting the American media with an absurdly broad brush, Helmore seems to forget that, amid the corporate turmoil at the top, American reporters have continued to do their jobs, and do them very, very well. If Trump is “winning,” he’s certainly not winning on coverage.
The reason you know about the devastating consequences of USAID’s dismantling, or that Pentagon officials recklessly use Signal to communicate classified information, or how the Trump family has been bewitched by cryptocurrency lobbyists, is because of American media — some of it corporate-owned. The Wall Street Journal — owned, along with Fox News, by Rupert Murdoch, a friend of Trump’s — has relentlessly reported on the president’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, knowing full well they would be sued the moment they published. CBS’s Jennifer Jacobs has broke story after story of turmoil in the Pentagon and the intelligence community, despite her network’s capitulation to Trump.
Helmore would do better to understand the more subtle ways that ownership influences reporting (as distinct from opinion journalism; there is a difference between setting ideological limits on a section of the paper and attempting to kill a news story entirely). Editors might be less enthusiastic to enlist lawyers for mid-level stories. Reporting jobs might be cut to improve newsrooms’ bottom line. Every now and then, a top editor might have to take some serious heat from the paper’s ownership.
If there was a documented case of a newsroom owner storming in and demanding to kill new, bombshell reporting that would shed significant light on a corner of the administration, it would ignite a firestorm among journalists. The public would know. Perhaps the closest example is Shari Redstone’s scrutiny of 60 Minutes, which is, again, very bad and troubling. But this is nowhere near Helmore’s assertion that American media is “standing near the edge of a cliff,”
I find this sort of unhelpful, even harmful hand-wringing over the state of American media to be very common in well-intentioned commentary on admittedly dangerous actions from the White House. The attacks on press freedom detailed by Just Security, for instance, make reporters’ jobs more difficult. But many of them are not fatal. Not being able to access Trump’s Oval Office sprays — where dozens of independent media remain to cover his remarks — is irrelevant to the reporter who is deeply sourced inside the White House.
I think Nancy Gibbs gets much closer to the real problem facing national media: that they lack trust and an audience across wide swaths of America. Even then, she notes, reporting from legacy outlets matters.
“The reporting that is being done by those reporters is influencing public opinion,” she says. “It is just mediated through many other people distributing their insights.”
