In age of Trump, political reporters are in demand, under fire
WASHINGTON — Asked to reflect on the relationship between President Donald Trump and the news media — an abusive yet symbiotic union, if there ever was one — Stephen Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, paused a moment to consider.
“It’s the first Mcluhanesque presidency,” he said, finally, leaning back in a chair on the parlor floor of his residence here last month. “One hundred percent.”
Bannon, who was recently excommunicated from his own media empire, Breitbart News, is not the first to draw a line from Trump to Marshall Mcluhan, the theorist whose “the medium is the message” mantra predicted a media-saturated era where reality is less important than its representation.
Still, Bannon has a point: “Fox & Friends” routinely prompts presidential edicts, tsetse-like tweets from @realdonaldtrump swarm lawmakers and shape policy, and the pronouncements of Time magazine or MSNBC’S Joe Scarborough can carry outsize importance in the Oval Office.
“The digital world is more real than the physical, analog world,” Bannon said, adding, of Trump, “He understands that in a very visceral way.”
Since Trump took office a year ago, the political press has endured a sustained assault from a chief executive who has called journalists “the enemy of the American people.” Yet the news media has also driven decisions inside the West Wing to a degree perhaps unmatched since the scandal-ridden days of Richard Nixon. And White House aides and reporters alike say that political reality is being refracted by the media in an unprecedented way.
Some reporters, in unguarded moments, say they fear for journalists’ safety. Margaret Talev, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, was moved to tears in an interview as she recounted the death threats that now routinely land in her colleagues’ emails.
Other journalists — ironic, cynical or simply enterprising,