The Associated Press
Nancy Benac
WASHINGTON–Thomas Jefferson railed against newspapers as “polluted vehicles” of falsehood and error.
Richard Nixon tangled with reporters in the toxic atmosphere of Watergate, considering them the “enemy.”
Bill Clinton publicly condemned “purveyors of hatred and division” on the public air waves.
Historians can point to plenty of past presidents who have sparred with the press. But they’re hard-pressed to find anything that approaches the all-out attack on the media that President Donald Trump seems intent on escalating at every turn.
“There has never been a kind of holistic jihad against the news media like Trump is executing,” said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley.
“Trump is determined to beat and bloody the press whenever he finds himself in a hole, and that’s unique.”
Trump, who long has had an adversarial relationship with the media, opened a 77-minute East Room news conference yesterday by saying he hoped to “get along a little bit better” with the press going forward–“if that’s possible.”
“Maybe it’s not and that’s OK, too,” he added.
Clearly, he’s fine with that.
The president proceeded to circle back to the press time and again during the news conference to complain about “fake news” purveyed by “dishonest” reporters.
He called out individual news organizations, reporters, and stories, labelling them “disgraceful, “discredited,” and “a joke.”
He lamented “the bias and the hatred” directed at him.
“It’s all fake news, it’s all fake news,” Trump said of reports that members of his team were in regular contact with Russian officials during the campaign.
Trump said he was determined to “take my message straight to the people” because “the press honestly is out of control.”
The president posted a pre-dawn message on his Twitter account today expressing gratitude to his supporters “for all of the nice statements on the Press Conference yesterday.”
“Rush Limbaugh said one of the greatest ever,” Trump said in his tweet, referring to the nationally-known conservative radio talk show host.
“Fake media not happy!”
The performance yesterday was part of a calculated strategy by Trump to discredit those who are reporting on the chaos and stumbles of the administration’s opening weeks and to boost enthusiasm among the president’s core supporters.
But Princeton historian Julian Zelizer warned that while Trump may shift attention away from his problems with the drama of such a press conference, “there are some signs that Republicans are getting tired of this.”
Zelizer said all presidents have had their moments of tension with the press, but “the scale and scope of this is unlike anything that we’ve seen in the past.”
Nixon’s increasingly difficult relations with the press during the unfolding of the Watergate scandal may be the closest parallel, Zelizer said, with the embattled president famously telling reporters at a 1973 news conference that “I am not a crook.”
The bad blood between presidents and the press stretches back to the nation’s early years.
Jefferson often is remembered for his stirring defence of the press, when he wrote in 1787 that, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
But two decades later, as president, Jefferson had a different take on the press that sounds something like an early version of Trump’s complaints against “fake news.”
Jefferson wrote to a newspaper editor in 1807: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
