News media compliance making Trump more dangerous

The mass media's failure to hold Donald Trump to account for his malicious presidency is setting a dangerous course for global democracy, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

IN THE FIRST three weeks of the Trump Presidency, the world’s media has been tasked with chronicling the daily chaos of an unfit President who wields power more like a dictator than a democratically elected leader.

During this horror show unfolding in one of the world’s biggest democracies and its reverberations around the world, too many news outlets are showing they still do not understand how to act in the public interest when reporting about Donald Trump.

Instead, they let him play them like a violin, gifting him a mass-media platform to manipulate the public, to lie, to spread hate and to create an alternative reality where he is a strongman doing important work. It is this alternative reality that Trump has used to twice be elected president.

The failures of many mainstream journalists in reporting about Trump hinge on three related problems: a focus on his words rather than his actions and their consequences; a reluctance to report that Trump is acting in bad faith and undermining American democracy; and that his chaos and lies are a sign of a weak leader, not a strong one.

Donald Trump wins presidency thanks to lack of media scrutiny

The failure of the media to hold Donald Trump to account for his actions and words helped convince the voting public to re-elect him as President.

In these failures, these news outlets are helping Trump gain power and are failing to act on behalf of the public in holding him to account for the way he is failing Americans, and in turn, undermining world peace and stability.

An example of reporting Trump’s words without reporting the consequences of those words is a piece published by Politico. It opens by reporting that ‘President Donald Trump and his allies – including his former education secretary – have publicly zeroed in on the Education Department as a potential next target for his cutting spree’.

In the next paragraph, the article describes that Trump is doing this because he says the department ‘has evolved into a weapon wielded by progressives to enforce “woke” education policies and is a waste of taxpayer dollars’.

The rest of the article never comes back to Trump’s allegations about the Education Department being a woke weapon, leaving them there as if they were facts. It also never explains to the reader what the consequences of shutting the Education department are for the people.

These consequences, reported by CNN, include teacher layoffs and larger classes, which will hit GOP voting states the worst. NBC reports that the Education Department, rather than being a weapon of woke ideology, has elementary and secondary school programs that support ‘50 million students in about 98,000 public schools and 32,000 private schools’.

Any article about Trump’s plans to abolish this funding should obviously mention these dire consequences for a whole generation of American children.

Another major failing is that most news media refuse to bluntly report that Trump is acting in bad faith. This failure comes from journalists’ misunderstanding of what independence and neutrality mean in journalism.

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Neutrality does not mean that everything is reported as if it has no moral basis. Independence does not mean that a journalist cannot report basic facts about the world. Rather than speak the obvious, journalists use proxies which imply some people don’t agree with Trump.

One example of this is reporting that there has been public backlash at Trump’s actions, such as this NBC headline:

‘Trump sparks outcry with implication that DEI policies are at fault in DC midair collision.’

Another way of showing that people disagree with Trump is to quote criticism of Trump from Democrats or other sources, presenting a morally neutral “he said, she said” template.

The problem with this framing is that the whole point of the MAGA movement is to troll people who support progressive policies like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, so when Trump supporters see headlines like this, they appreciate what Trump is doing.

A more accurate way to report how Trump’s accusation would be to use this headline: ‘Trump falsely and absurdly claims DEI policies are at fault in DC midair collision’. This headline provides factual, accurate and useful information about how Trump’s baseless allegation is a bad-faith act.

The third major problem in Trump reporting is the characterisation of Trump as in control, acting in an authoritative way and as being a strong leader. This characterisation is fundamentally false. The reality is that Trump is out of control, lacking authority in his own administration and fundamentally weak. Trump behaves incoherently and constantly lies because he is weak. Not because he is strong.

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This strong-man misrepresentation of Trump is evident in news reporting that treats as positive Trump’s practice of announcing something ludicrous and then having to walk it back later.

For example, it was clear as soon as Trump’s tariffs were announced, and stock markets went into meltdown, that he had overreached and needed to back down. Yet, rather than report backflip-tariff-pauses as weakness, too many outlets reported them as if they showed Trump was a good negotiator and had “won” something for America.

For example, newswire service Reuters set the frame for countless other outlets with the headline: ‘Mexican troops deployed to border as part of deal to pause US tariffs.’

Similarly, when Trump made his atrocious comments – called ‘stunning’, ‘audacious’ and ‘improbable’ by CNN – suggesting the U.S. would illegally displace Palestinians from their Gaza homeland to turn the country into a real estate opportunity, reports of his Administration openly contradicting him were not treated as weakness and chaos, but just normal political business.

Even when Trump then walked back the walked-back comments on Truth Social, rather than framing this utterly unhinged suggestion and behaviour from Trump as a sign he is not in control, has no positive plans and instead would dangerously commit war crimes against the people of Palestine, the media let Trump use the entire fiasco to reinforce his strong-man authoritarian image.

Those outlets that still do not comprehend how they are contributing to the reinforcement of Trump’s power, rather than acting as a much-needed handbrake on that power through proper scrutiny and critique of the truth of the Trump Presidency, are not only letting down their profession, but undermining American democracy and contributing to a more dangerous and chaotic world.