Trumps latest New York Times interview is a perfect example of his phony war with the press

[babylonsister]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/5/15194056/trump-war-media


Trump’s latest New York Times interview is a perfect example of his phony war with the press
A pro wrestling–style show feud for mutual benefit.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail]
Apr 5, 2017, 2:30pm EDT

snip//

Trump’s war on the media hasn’t materialized

In this context, it’s worth noting that once upon a time Trump seemed to genuinely threaten a crackdown on press freedoms.

He spoke of a desire to “open up” libel laws, and threatened regulatory retaliation against Amazon for Post articles he didn’t like as well as lawsuits against the Times. There are very real things that a president could at least try to do to coerce media outlets into delivering favorable coverage. Lyndon Johnson, for example, appears to have used a proposed bank merger as leverage with the owner of the Houston Chronicle to gain the Texas newspaper’s support for his legislative agenda.

But Trump does not appear to be doing any of these things. There is no indication that his Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, has any unusual opinions on the First Amendment’s limitations on libel lawsuits. The regulators he has thus far appointed seem to be very conventional pro-business Republicans who are inclined to make business-friendly rulings without a lot of interest in disciplining companies for editorial content. Trump, for example, signed a very unpopular bill rolling back broadband privacy regulations rather than using it as leverage to try to get Comcast to deliver more Trump-friendly coverage on NBC properties.

And, indeed, in a purely commercial sense, Trump has been generally good for business — Rachel Maddow’s ratings are up, as is Vox.com’s traffic and subscriptions to a range of magazines. And he’s been very willing to give big newspaper and television networks the exclusive interviews they crave.

What matters to Trump isn’t any actual crushing of the media, but simply driving the narrative in his core followers’ heads that the media is at war with him. With that pretense in place, critical coverage and unflattering facts can be dismissed even as Trump selectively courts the press to inject his own preferred ideas into the mainstream.