The Enlightenment

Photo courtesy of Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Despite claiming to fight against “the Orange Menace”, liberal institutional papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post played a large part in allowing Trump to rise to power.

Even though the showrunners at these papers admit that Trump is bad for the country and democracy, they continue to obsessively cover the disgraced former President and in doing so, give him the attention he desperately needs to survive.

Adding fuel to the fire

Donald Trump thrives off of capturing the attention of Americans. He proclaimed in his book The Art of the Deal that

“From a bottom-line business perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.”

And my, has Trump been good at capturing publicity. It has been widely reported in academia as well as in media circles themselves how much the “mainstream media”, such as MSNBC, CNN, and NBC, are addicted to covering the former President.

Media firm mediaQuant estimated Trump received a staggering $5.6 billion in free media during his 2016 campaign—a sum more than twice as large as his rival Hillary Clinton and enough to carry him into the White House.

Wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage continued throughout his term, and even today, the liberal media continues to hawk over a man who was last in office over three years ago.

Dumbing down the discourse

Defenders of the mainstream media’s Trump obsession insist that this non-stop coverage reported on and held the President accountable. The mainstream media, they claim, was doing real journalism.

Nothing could be further from the truth: coverage of the President was often surface-level—even bordering on gossip—and distracted away from, rather than focused on, the harm that Trump’s policies were doing.

As the Trump presidency emerged, so too did an “Anti-Trump media industrial complex”. The liberal media began to cater to an older and wealthier audience that was psychologically traumatized by Trump’s election, but unlikely to have been materially affected by his policies.

So, the liberal media began to systematically churn out “news coverage” that:

• Encouraged the audience to be continually morally outraged over Trump’s personal actions and speech
• Emphasized “dunking on” or “owning”, i.e. dominating the President
• Highlighted the President’s violation of institutional norms and strange behavior as the worst aspect of his Presidency
• Focused on the negative emotional appeal of his Tweets

Examples of this type of journalism is The Times‘ “The Complete List of Trump Insults” (Look at him! He insults people!) and WaPost’s “President Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading statements” (We all know politicians lie. But Donald Trump has taken it too far.)

This news coverage, while fulfilling an animalistic psychological desire of some liberal viewers, utterly destroyed any discourse about Trump.

For one, an entire cohort of consumers of liberal media have been programmed to believe that simply being constantly outraged is enough to stop Trump (see the #Resistance “movement”, a group of people who thought they were fighting Trump by posting viral moments of him on Twitter).

For another, the liberal media fundamentally shifted the lens through which Trump’s presidency was viewed that severely downplayed the damage of the presidency. Instead of focusing on the material harm that Trump’s policy was inflicting, Trump’s harm was measured by the number of people he personally offended.

The Trump administration separated immigrant families at the border, allowed companies to dump wastewater into rivers, and downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. So why did The Times waste time discussing Trump insulting Hollywood celebrities Chrissy Teigen and John Legend?

Profit over Democracy

The reason the liberal media endlessly harped on Donald Trump’s ridiculous tweets rather than engaging in useful critique of his administration is because, in a very cynical sense, it was good for business.

Former CBS News executive Les Moonves said so himself in 2016:

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The liberal media knew it was bad to cover Trump. They knew they disagreed with him. But like a drug addict, the liberal media kept relapsing on the easy high of selling outrage to a liberal audience.

In a way, the liberal media actually had and has every incentive not to scrutinize Trump. Sure, he is destroying the country, but chaos is profitable. Someone has to film the burning buildings.

That’s why the liberal media was secretly panicking when Joe Biden was elected. TV ratings plummeted, because Biden wasn’t a chaos agent and there was no more outrage to sell. The American people could finally catch a break.

But of course, the liberal media cannot kick the addiction of overzealous Trump coverage, which is why they have resorted to conducting “reports” about how Trump’s personal social media venture is struggling with revenue.

These articles add nothing to the political discourse, but they do serve to make money—and ensure that Trump remains relevant.

Why it all matters

The liberal media has continued to successfully present itself as the guardians of truth and democracy. The WaPost even has the words “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its subheading, to indicate the seriousness with which the liberal media takes itself.

But the truth is that the liberal media is little more than a money-chasing machine that occasionally does journalism. They will report on election results on the one hand and then legitimize unserious, far-right politicians like Lauren Boebert by interviewing them.

If the media shut up about him, Trump would be gone in a week. But despite their huffing and puffing, the liberal media sold the country out in 2016 by obsessing over Trump and threaten to do the same in 2024.

Then again, what more should we expect from the liberal media? These are the same outlets that conduct paid spin for fossil fuel companies as the world warms and cheered on the illegal and bloody Iraq War.

The liberal media—be it The Times, WaPost, CNN, MSNBC, and so forth—are private media companies positioned in a capitalist system, and so their coverage is biased towards what makes them money. That usually means favoring donors and the status quo.

As the liberal media continues to fawn over Trump, their coverage of poverty and climate change, two issues that affect many people, remains mighty scarce. Coincidentally, these issues offend advertisers and expose structural issues in the economy.

None of this is to say that liberal media does not do good reporting. To be sure, it does. But let’s remember that the self-important liberal media is not nearly as holy as it makes itself out to be—and has done real damage to the country.