Media

When I was a nipper, a staple of children’s television was a show called Why Don’t You? The full title, as the theme song made clear, was: “Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?" Very “meta”, as we didn’t then say. And, of course, generations of children sat on the sofa gormlessly drinking Um Bongo while we watched the show’s cast demonstrate all the wholesome arts-and-crafts activities we could have been doing instead of watching TV. This was a few years before our parents discovered the joys of eating microwave TV dinners while watching Master Chef. A previous generation feared that the rise of television would put an end to children reading. It didn’t I start with this to give a bit of context.

Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but grief. No election victories, no sway in Washington, just the hatred of the journalists he subsidizes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Media power in the 21st century is about platforms, not publications. Bezos shouldn’t have needed Musk to teach him this: the whole strategy behind the business that made him rich, Amazon.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has become horribly over-diagnosed. Now, anyone who expresses doubts about his wondrous abilities – or just fails to repeat the White House’s preferred talking points – risks being branded a "TDS" sufferer. It’s boring. Still, there remains a large faction of elite journalists, social-media influencers and political actors who loathe Donald Trump with a pathological intensity and who feel their mission in life must be to undermine him by whatever means necessary. They have spent the last decade condemning Trump and his supporters as conspiracy loons even as they leap from one dark theory to the next – Trump is a Russian asset! A closet Nazi! An Al Capone-style mobster! A serial rapist and possibly even a pedophile!

Though reporters covering the Trump administration are very familiar with Steven Cheung, the Donald’s combative White House communications director, he’s not a recognizable face to the general public. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt plays good cop, deflecting questions; Cheung is bad cop, trolling the media on X. But Cheung had a moment in the spotlight early this month during a press conference in which Trump announced reduced prices for GLP-1 “fat drugs.” “Where’s Steve?” Trump said. “He’s taking it.” The press is very familiar with Cheung’s weight issues. When one media outlet compared him to the rather overweight Bond villain Oddjob, Cheung leaned into the racially tinged stereotype and posed for a photo while wearing a bowler hat.

Fake news indeed! The British Daily Telegraph has reported that the BBC deceptively edited a speech by Donald Trump to make it look like the President had ordered his supporters to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  The footage was aired as part of the BBC documentary Trump: A Second Chance? in October 2024. The ruse involved splicing together two statements made by Trump over an hour apart. This made it seem like Trump had said that "We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you're not gonna have a country anymore.” In fact, “walk down to the Capitol had actually been followed by “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

The best time to call is the weekend. Or early in the morning. Or late at night. Definitely not when he’s on the golf course. If he’s alone, he’s more inclined to chat. If he’s in a good mood, you might get a few minutes. If he’s in a bad mood he’ll be brief, but you’re still liable to get a usable quote. That’s how White House reporters describe cold-calling Donald Trump, perhaps the most accessible president in American history. He’s not the first to smuggle a cell phone into the White House: Barack Obama insisted on keeping his BlackBerry throughout his time in office, despite the angst it caused his staff. But you couldn’t just call Obama. You can just call Trump.

Zero-hour was approaching. A joint US-Israeli attack on the mullahs’ mountain fastness at Fordow seemed imminent. The B-52s were on the tarmac, the USS Nimitz had taken to sea, Ambassador Mike Huckabee was reaching for the smelling salts.  And then? A last-minute pause. “I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” said the President. Delays like these have now become a standard part of Trump’s box of tricks. If a drama – like the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs of earlier this year – can be kept going for a little longer, then all the more time to extract further concessions from the opposing party. As negotiating tactics go there are certainly worse ones. But was there another reason?

“Trump has lowest 100-day approval rating in 80 years,” screamed ABC News at the start of this week. The ABC News/Washington Post poll, conducted by Ipsos to mark Trump’s 100th day in office, was one of a handful that have shown Trump’s approval rating dipping below 40 percent for the first time. There is just one problem: the pollsters who are showing the worst numbers for Trump are the ones who got the election most wrong. Take the ABC/WaPo/Ipsos poll, that showed Trump on 39 percent approval. In their final poll of the 2024 cycle, they found a three-point lead for Kamala Harris. Ipsos’s other poll for Reuters had a two-point advantage for Harris nationally. Trump ended up winning the popular vote by one and a half points.

When it comes to the many forthcoming books about President Joe Biden’s decline, only one question matters: what role did the national news media play in assisting his White House in the cover-up? It’s a question that, if early snippets and sample releases are anything to go by, will remain largely ignored by the authors and their colleagues in media. A number of reporters are releasing volumes about Biden’s conspicuous cognitive decline, that many of them supposedly only became aware of on the debate stage last June. Many of these journalists actively worked to smear anyone who had noticed the former president’s state of mind, including right-leaning commentators and Republicans, as far back as 2021.