Why Are the Media So Afraid of Trump?
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What warning does David Frum give about Trump?
Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I'll be joined by Marty Baron, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at the Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos. Marty Baron is one of the most important media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully, both in person and in his memoir, Collision of Power, about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press. I'll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden.
But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term. President Trump began his campaign and his spent much of his first term attacking the media, calling the media, free media, enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining and generally persecuting and often inciting dangerous threats against individual members of the press. If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked both digitally and often in person. in ways unlike anything ever seen before. Death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, racist, the worst kind of garbage. I even got a little splash of it myself.
I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don't read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree. But it was nasty. But it was also mostly ineffective. The press worked during the first Trump term. Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing, about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while... Their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past.
How has Trump pressured the media during his presidency?
And while the pressures on them were real, it did not, in the end, detract from getting the job done for the most part in the first Trump term. In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America's free media. He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers won't happen unless the mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way, unless those institutions change the way that the reporting arms behave themselves. And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements to Trump. Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced.
ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump's so-called library, but really to himself, because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC's corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit. Trump complained that he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris, which you said, so what? You don't like our editing? You have no claim on that. That gives you no right of due action. I mean, send us a letter if you don't like the editing. Other people don't like the editing of the interview we did with you. That's not lawsuit material.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What warning does David Frum give about Trump?
0:27–2:29
2
How has Trump pressured the media during his presidency?
2:29–5:24
3
What challenges do media institutions face today?
5:24–10:40
4
Why are media owners afraid of Trump?
10:40–15:33
5
What is the difference between Trump’s first and second term regarding media?
15:33–21:52
6
How has the media landscape changed since the Watergate scandal?
21:52–31:41
7
What role does diversity play in today’s newsrooms?
31:41–41:17