A Clash for Control of History:
The Unique Relationship between the President and the Press
By John Bynan
On November 7th President Trump and CNN White House Reporter Jim Acosta clashed at a routine press conference. Acosta questioned the President on his claims regarding a caravan of migrants supposedly heading towards the United States, speaking towards a video Trump ran ahead of the Midterm Elections. The two argued over whether or not the caravan was “an invasion” as the President called it, with Trump then assertively moving on to another reporter. Acosta refused to back away, trying to squeak out a question about possible indictments coming down from the Russia investigation. Trump fired back, responding with greater hostility than before, clearly becoming agitated with the reporter’s refusal to quiet. Getting personal, he called Acosta “A rude, terrible person.” As a whole, the exchange was heated and uncomfortable, and honestly cringeworthy to watch, ending with an aide trying to take the microphone from a dodging, unwilling Acosta. The video quickly went viral, generating criticism from news organizations dissecting the sequence of events on television and regular people coming across the video while scrolling through their twitter feeds. Even more outrage followed when the White House stripped Jim Acosta of his White House press credentials, which was followed by CNN filing a lawsuit against the administration.
While those credentials have reluctantly been reinstalled, and the lawsuit dropped, the series of events that transpired weeks ago are far from settled. No, instead Americans have recognized the well-established pattern that their commander-in-chief does not like the press, and targets both individual members of the media and news organizations as a whole he dislikes. With this in mind, the jarring conflict at the White House should be at least a little less surprising. Since President Trump took office, his relationship with the press has been anything but friendly. He’s coined the term “fake news” to describe any news outlet he disagrees with, which really has become a list of the news organizations that report critically of the Trump administration. He called for licenses to be revoked, upset after NBC News reported he wanted to increase the amount of nuclear weapons the United States possesses (Nichols, 2017). President Trump has also threatened to change the Libel laws, making defamation of character a more expensive offense (Gardner, 2018). His overall treatment and attitude can really be summarized by a single tweet from February of 2017, calling The New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS the “enemy of the American people.” That’s an incredibly serious and wild claim.
President Trump’s behavior with the press has been criticized extensively, with the National Press Club referring to his latest decision to revoke the credentials of Acosta as “unprecedented and beneath the dignity of the office (Axelrod, 2018).” It’s easy in this moment, with these attacks so fresh in the minds of the American people, for the National Press Club’s claim to appear unquestionably correct. But, it’s also worth examining the past to test this claim. Is President Trump truly a unique attacker of the press? Or has the office itself, and the struggle between Presidents and the press for control of the narrative, been an inevitable, unfortunate reality of American politics? Let’s go back and look.
Start at the beginning or choose your favorite President:
