Why the Legacy Media Protects Trump
This week I got a curious New York Times alert on my phone (picture above). It reported the news that the US economy declined last quarter. It was a rather notable sign of the damage Trump has already done as president, and the type to get the attention of checked-out normies. I then noticed that it contained a qualifier: “But the data is muddled by quirks in the way it is calculated.”
I never recall any such qualification being added to bad news from the Biden administration. This alert is just one of many examples of how the Times and other legacy media outlets have tried hard to give Trump the benefit of the doubt and have him come off as a “normal” politician. Trump raged like a madman throughout his entire campaign, and his unpopular moves now come straight out of the Project 2025 playbook. When it came to his ravings, the legacy press reinterpreted them and made them sound like coherent arguments. The public has been shocked by much of what Trump has done so far in large part because he denied he was implementing Project 2025 during the campaign and the media took this inveterate liar at his word and dropped the subject. If not for this intervention in 2024 and the “but her emails” full court press in 2016 I am not sure if Trump ever would have been elected to the presidency.
This is a hard fact that many progressives have been anxious to overlook. For years we have imbibed a false narrative that legacy media has a “liberal bias,” and while the Right has established its own powerful media ecosystem, we on the left have been content to trust centrist corporate outlets thinking that they and “the truth” are on our side. This has had absolutely disastrous consequences. While the reactionaries are fed a steady diet of propaganda and act upon it, the rest of the country is shown every single event through a fatuous “both sides” framing. Of course, that only applies to people consuming news from traditional outlets instead of listening to podcasts that hawk supplements and woo woo bullshit, which is an increasing number of people.
I have been asking myself why the traditional press seems so committed to protecting Trump, a man who has declared war against them time and again. Some of it is economics. They know they have captured liberal readers and think they won’t lose them, and so want to expand their subscriber base by getting conservatives to give them their money. However, I think there is something deeper afoot.
Like the all the higher echelons of American life, elite media has increasingly become the purview of the highly credentialed class of people who grew up in the same suburbs and neighborhoods and went to the same schools. They are the “winners” in a system that purports to be a meritocracy. If they admit that we have an illiterate wannabe despot criminal as our president, they will have to also admit that the same system that put them on top has failed. They are desperate not to have that system questioned, especially as they are trying to get their kids through the same schools and make use of their connections in the status quo’s hierarchy.
Relatedly, the people in elite-level media are affluent and live a comfortable existence. They will not suffer much from Trump’s lawless revenge campaign, and in fact he drives their ratings up. Why challenge that dynamic? Beyond all of this is a form of moral laziness. Elite media has been trotting out the same “both sides” narrative for decades, and admitting that the president is a deranged failure would mean that they have to take a stance, and they just don’t want to do that. They’d rather be well-paid stenographers with all of the right things on their resumes and second homes.
Admitting Trump’s true nature would also embarrass them, since they have spent a decade trying to portray him as just another politician. If that’s not true (and it isn’t) the media stands to lose a great deal of its authority. If they spent ten years getting that basic fact wrong, why should anyone trust them? It’s the sunk cost fallacy, but with stakes as high as they can get.
Trump is both a reflection of and a catalyst for a society where nothing matters beyond personal aggrandizement. I highly doubt that most of the reporters in the White House press pool think democracy matters all that much. As I have said time and again, in the last few decades America went through a quiet shift where most people stopped believing in its animating ideology. Now we are seeing what happens when the rotting structure is given a hard kick. There’s still a chance that enough people can be mobilized to be push back, but anyone expecting the legacy media to be anything other than an antagonist to that effort is deluded. They might be more invested in the status quo than any other group of people in this country.