The Media in the Age of Trump

Allies of the Ruling Class

Somehow, the media still don’t realize they’re locked into a nosedive of their own making.

Historically, the American media has always been politically partisan to some extent—the myth of “neutrality” that was especially prevalent in the mid-20th century was just that, a myth. But over the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st, they have become phalanxes for a ruling class that’s elevated their own interests above those of American citizens. The press has complied in this enterprise, working dutifully as the ruling class’s stenographers in order to ensure their uninterrupted rule for generations to come. 

One particularly brazen and cynical tactic the modern press uses is the eventual admission of truth once they can no longer hide the obvious. 

CNN’s Jake Tapper is looking to cash in with a new book on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. The problem is that Tapper himself participated in covering up Biden’s mental lapses for years. Like the rest of the media, Tapper consistently pushed back on any talk of Biden’s deterioration during his presidency and accused those who brought it up of using Republican talking points. 

Now, Tapper will tell the truth he denied for so long—and net a tidy profit while doing it.

A righteously angry Mollie Hemingway responded to Tapper’s ploy with her typical exuberance: “The MOTHER. BUH-LEEP-ING. AUDACITY. Have you no decency? Have you NO shame?” And this isn’t the first time Hemingway has exposed Tapper’s malfeasance and obvious lack of journalistic ethics. As she reported in a long exposé last year at The Federalist, Tapper was one of the chief figures who worked to promote the Russia collusion hoax.

Like the Owl of Minerva, when the media do their job it comes far too late to matter. The cynical nature of Tapper’s book project is a symptom of a corrupt media that no longer fulfills the basic responsibilities they’re tasked with. Instead, they’re working on behalf of a ruthless establishment that’s trying everything they can to subvert the wishes of the American people.

Having a healthy media is, after all, a key aspect of maintaining free government. As Arthur Milikh, who currently serves under Michael Anton at the State Department, has argued, a “free people can neither rule itself nor defend itself adequately and peacefully without a free press. Indeed, without it, the Founders thought the opposite would reign—tyranny, mediocrity, and corruption.” A free press, Milikh points out, is also important for advancing scientific endeavors, among other vital aspects of American society. 

Today, however, the media seem far more interested in censoring their political enemies than being a bulwark of republican government. They even gang up to attack media outlets that don’t comply with the ruling class’s demands, as happened to the New York Post in 2020 when they tried reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The press, along with Big Tech, worked on behalf of the regime to quash the story, falsely calling it “Russian disinformation.”

The media’s open and obvious corruption helps explain the recent moves by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and the Trump White House to assert control over the president’s traveling press pool. Formerly overseen by the White House Correspondents’ Association, the Trump administration is now picking which media outlets get to follow the president. 

Out goes the old guard like Associated Press and Reuters—and in come The Blaze and Newsmax.

Reactions to the White House’s move, of course, predictably ranged from the apoplectic to the deranged. 

Though there’s always potential that the president will simply start picking lackeys to report on his doings, that problem seems almost quaint in an age where the media virtually all row in the same direction. The mountain of disinformation they’ve peddled from 2015 onward has damaged Trump and has helped the Democratic Party and their epigones. 

Seen in this light, Thomas Jefferson’s musings on the press seem very apropos: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.”

For our press, their minds are filled with fantasies. It’s always 1973, and they are on the verge of getting a Nixonian Trump who’s broken countless laws and violated the Constitution in a thousand ways. They’re the forces for good standing against the president’s amassing of monarchical power. But, like the Democrats’ theater kid antics that were on display during President Trump’s speech to a joint Congress on Tuesday night, this is sheer hubris.

But the media’s fantasy shatters when encountering reality. As Nathan Pinkoski recently noted at UnHerd, Watergate was about personal vendettas, not high principles. Disgruntled FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was angered because Nixon had passed him over for the position of FBI Director. Felt then leaked damaging information about the president to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in an act of vengeance. Author Beverly Gage writes that Felt’s motivations were not to “preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.”

What can be done about the current state of the American press? Their power and prestige, while falling, is still substantial. As Arthur Milikh writes, Benjamin Franklin “half-joked that the press is like the Spanish Inquisition in its moral authority to force and shape belief through fear and intimidation.” 

Milikh makes the case that for Franklin, the only actual check on the press is the public uniting against them. A revolt against their constant lies and distortions is, after all, partly what the 2024 election was about. Americans, especially orthodox Christians, must therefore increase their involvement in all aspects of politics. Voting, while necessary, is not enough.

The media is fortunately being checked in numerous ways other than electoral politics. Audiences watching nightly newscasts on network TV are shriking. And Americans’ overall trust in the media has fallen precipitously in recent years. A Gallup survey last year found that just 31% of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media.

A long-term political project is overturning the misguided Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, where the Court gutted libel standards and invented the “actual malice” standard, a far higher threshold, out of thin air.

Constitutional scholar Carson Holloway has convincingly argued that we should return to the pre-Sullivan libel standards that stretch back to the founding era. In American law, Holloway notes that libel was traditionally considered as “an abuse of the freedom of the press” and was therefore “unprotected by the Constitution.” He says that this “view was embraced not just by solid majorities but by all of the justices in cases like Near v. Minnesota in 1931 and Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire in 1942.” It was even “affirmed…as late as 1957 in Roth v. United States.” From the American founders’ generation onward, injurious speech, including libel, seditious libel, and obscenity, was not protected by the First Amendment since liberty was never thought to include licentiousness. We should once again follow this moral and legal tradition.

When the media publishes or airs false and defamatory stories, they should be sued. This tactic is already paying dividends, as some legacy networks may soon go the way of Gawker. 

CNN recently settled after a Florida jury sided against them in a $5 million lawsuit. The same network also settled with Nick Sandmann, the MAGA hat-wearing smirker, for an undisclosed amount of money over a $275 million lawsuit brought after the network defamed him in 2019. And ABC recently settled with Donald Trump for $15 million.

Even though the media is largely a creature of the regime, that doesn’t mean the Right shouldn’t use them to their advantage. Major pieces covering institutions such as the Claremont Institute and individuals such as American Reformer’s own Aaron Renn, who was featured yesterday in a long profile at the New York Times, are important ways to mainstream the Right. Though the Right has traditionally seen the media as an adversary, they should view them as a means to boosting their message with an audience they haven’t been able to reach on their own.

While still impressive in the short term, the power of the current media apparatus is nevertheless diminishing. Major platforms we’ve assumed will always be with us will likely fail in the next five to ten years. New institutions, newspapers, movie studios, and online journals will be established that are focused on the important work of reporting on stories of great import.

Neither the man in the box nor the Gray Lady tell you the complete truth—for now, you’ll have to venture out into the Wild West of Elon’s X and discover it for yourself. 

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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