From the Left

/

Politics

Trump's Reality TV Presidency Needs to Get Real

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Why is President Donald Trump still trying to turn the media into the bad guys of his reality TV show, er, I mean presidency?

If media bashing is the last refuge of scoundrels, as I often say, Trump had better save some for a rainy day. He's having plenty of those already.

Sure, media bashing is easy. At his Thursday news conference marking the end of his first four weeks in office, Trump reminded the reporters that media approval ratings are lower than those of Congress. That's cruel.

But we're used to it. Just about everybody hates the media, according to polls, but everybody has at least one favorite medium, whether it's in print, online or over the air. That's how we stay in business.

Politicians, by contrast, can beat bad press as long as they have the voters with them. For Trump that's still debatable, and he can't seem to forget it.

In fact, he was beating up on the press on the very day that a new Pew Research Center poll found his job approval to be much lower than those of other president in their first weeks in office: 39 per cent approved, while 56 percent disapproved.

 

I think Trump beats up on the media -- casually calling us "liars," "scum" or "dishonest," unless we give him friendly questions and glowing coverage -- because he needs a foil.

After all, he has both houses of Congress under control of his party. He has a pivotal seat to fill on the Supreme Court, tilting its majority in his favor. If things go wrong, who's left to blame? Ah, yes, the media!

Attacking the media might chip away at the ability of news media to challenge Team Trump's "alternative facts," as his counsel Kellyanne Conway memorably described their spin.

Media bashing also enables Trump to promote himself as a heroic champion of ordinary Americans against the media elite and what Vice President Spiro Agnew lambasted as "nattering nabobs of negativism," a label I often have worn with pride.

...continued

swipe to next page

(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

Tim Campbell Pat Bagley John Cole Phil Hands Dick Wright Bob Englehart