Even Trump-friendly media finds fault with Putin remarks
For the past year and a half, even when President Donald Trump said he was being treated unfairly by mainstream news sources, he could rely on the support of conservative media outlets – until Helsinki.
Even Trump’s most ardent supporters in the media, including many at Fox News Channel and The Wall Street Journal, were critical of his siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the issue of interference in the 2016 presidential election.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s attempts Tuesday to walk back his comments made in Helsinki can repair the damage. The president on Tuesday said he accepted the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russians interfered with the 2016 election – with a qualifier.
Professing “full faith and support for America’s great intelligence agencies,” Trump told reporters at the White House, “it could be other people also” involved in the hacking of Democrats and pushing fake news during the 2016 campaign. Monday, while standing next to Putin during a joint press conference in Helsinki, Trump questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s finding and said the U.S. carries as much blame as Russia for tattered relations between the superpowers.
In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal declared the Helsinki summit’s press conference “a personal and national embarrassment.” Other outlets usually considered Trump apologists, including The Washington Times and The Drudge Report, came down critically on the president, too.
“We’re starting to see right-wing journalists criticize Trump in ways they haven’t before because even they can’t swallow defending the indefensible,” said Mark Feldstein, a broadcast journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The criticism continued Tuesday on “Fox and Friends,” a morning show Trump watches and has appeared on. Co-host Steve Doocy, who last month interviewed Trump live on the West Lawn, said the president’s submission to Trump “has got a lot of people ... criticizing him for not being bold.”
Still, some on the opinion side for Fox News and Fox Business remained stalwart with Trump. Sean Hannity, who interviewed Trump Monday night, told him, “you were very strong at the end of that press conference.”
The media responses to the Helsinki summit recalled that of last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Farleigh Dickinson University and author of “Fox News & American Politics: How One Channel Shapes American Politics & Society, except much of conservative media is not defending Trump in this case. When “Fox and Friends” criticizes the president, “that is a real signal,” he said.