Anti-Trump news coverage won’t work anymore — the media must change

Now that Donald Trump is heading back to the White House, it is time for the establishment-mainstream media to rethink their approach to how they cover their longtime nemesis.

Ever since Trump first rode down the escalator in June 2015, the relationship between the media and Trump has been, to say the least, a rocky one. Since that time, the main objective of Trump news coverage has apparently been to prevent the real estate mogul from winning the presidency.

For those keeping score, anti-Trump journalists have now lost two out of three. The journalistic establishment should ponder what all that might mean.

For nine years, the media have reveled in their role as leaders of the anti-Trump resistance. But the public has shown it doesn’t want the news industry to engage in activist push-journalism. Numerous surveys demonstrate that public trust in the news media is in steep decline. American citizens can live with opinion partisanship in the commentary sections of news outlets, but they don’t want it in the main news menu, where some balance is expected.

The Media Research Center has consistently reported the negative tone of news coverage throughout Trump’s political years — and the coverage of this fall’s presidential campaign between Trump and Kamala Harris was particularly disproportionate. The organization reported that 85 percent of Trump coverage on the big three broadcast networks was negative, whereas 78 percent of Harris coverage was positive. Even accounting for the right-leaning tilt of the Media Research Center, that is still quite lopsided.

The editors and producers in the corporate media towers have yet to figure out how little sway they actually have anymore with the public. These media big shots have lost touch with regular Americans, who are now refusing to be herded. The media would-be manipulators need to reckon with the notion that they aren’t leading if nobody is following.

News consumers have turned away from traditional media, now relying on social media, podcasters and the guy at the end of the bar for news updates. The magnitude of Trump’s electoral victory this week has many implications, to be sure, but one is that the establishment media have lost relevance with many Americans.

CNN’s Dana Bash tried to explain Harris’s defeat late on election night by suggesting that voters just didn’t know the vice president very well. That’s a bit difficult to figure, given that Harris was a senator before serving four years as Joe Biden’s vice president. But if there is any truth to that assertion, Bash might consider that her own channel spent too much time reporting about an offensive comedian who spoke at Trump rallies or the latest bombast Trump uttered on the campaign stump, not to mention the television time devoted to promoting which celebrities were performing at Harris rallies. If America didn’t know who Harris was, the media share much of the blame.

The media’s broad opposition to Trump both politically and personally is understandable in some senses. Trump made it a point over the years to publicly demean and antagonize the press. Few journalists in places such as CNN or the New York Times support Trump’s political stances, much less would ever vote for him. But referees at NFL football games get hassled by players and coaches all of the time, yet manage to maintain their dignity and keep their focus on making impartial rulings.

The American free press was created to hold government’s powerful leaders accountable, even at times serving an adversarial role. The establishment news media would be wise to aggressively hold the incoming Trump administration accountable, but they must do it in a fashion that serves the public’s information needs, not the selfish needs of journalists playing out their personal political grudges. There should be plenty of policy matters in need of news coverage during the upcoming term, without relying on the media’s old playbook of simply reporting that Trump is bad.

Such a step could help rebuild citizen trust in the news media and lessen the political divisiveness that has made Americans weary. Reportage that continues a focus solely on anti-Trump hostility will come off as boring and unproductive. Americans are no longer going to read or watch a news agenda about how awful Trump is. Individuals’ opinions of Trump are now fully baked in and not subject to change. Viewer ratings and page views will rapidly decline for news outlets that refuse to budge from a hostile Trump news lineup, and that will be bad for the news industry’s bottom line.

Given that Trump is indeed going back to the White House and is term-limited, the news media objective of keeping Trump out of the presidency is no longer operational. Presumably, with no Trump trials, impeachments or campaign rallies, the news media can focus on policy, legislation and management. They might be surprised by how measured, balanced news of substance would be welcomed by the American public, and how that could benefit the credibility of the journalism profession.

Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant.