U.S. President Donald Trump recently barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. Then he launched his own 24-hour television channel. Streamed live on YouTube, it is called "Trump TV: The Essential Content Channel." Despite the name, 95% of its viewers were gone within two days. There apparently was not much worth watching.
CNN and the other outlets barred from the White House argued the move violated the First Amendment and sought a temporary restraining order from the federal district court in Washington, D.C. The court ultimately ordered Trump to temporarily restore White House credentials for dozens of reporters, finding it likely that the ban had been imposed without adequate due process.
This needless uproar looks like evidence that Trump is erratic, angry and out of control. He still holds the United States and the world hostage to his impulses and instincts. The press ban, along with several other moves, finally crossed the line. Some Republican candidates running in the November midterm elections are distancing themselves from Trump on Iran, and his job approval rating is falling.
As fate would have it, the press ban backfired. ABC, CBS, Fox News, NBC and other outlets stood with the barred news organizations and halted their pooled broadcast coverage of White House events. Some outlets and wire services, including The Washington Post, temporarily stopped publishing new photographs of presidential events as a show of support.
These steps are symbolic for the reporters who cover Trump. But it is unclear how much they mean to Trump himself, at least. He once had a relationship with the press in which each side benefited from the other. He won the presidency thanks to the extraordinary access and the exposure the press gave him, which amounted to free advertising.
The more frustrated Trump becomes with falling approval ratings and widespread ridicule, the more willing he may be to control the press, as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping do. He has praised authoritarian leaders who suppress freedom of expression to stay in power.
Perhaps in recent days Trump was testing how far he can go. He has mastered the art of communicating directly with the public through social media and his own platform, Truth Social. As a presidential candidate, he successfully exploited public distrust of journalists. He fed that distrust by relentlessly denouncing every unfavorable report as "fake news."
He is not the first president to fight the press, but he went a step further by defining it as a hostile force that threatens national security. Neither former President George W. Bush, a Republican, nor former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, received favorable treatment from reporters. Even so, both stressed how vital a free and unfettered press is to democracy.
So-called patriots attack the press in the name of freedom. But what a state-controlled press promises is not freedom but subjugation. Do these patriots really want only government-approved news? If so, are they not missing the central role of the press, which is to protect the public by scrutinizing those in power?
Sometimes it is hard to tell whether politicians need reporters more, or reporters need politicians more. It is a give-and-take romance between two sides that can never grow close. Without an interesting and consequential subject, there is no coverage. Without the press, the subject is not revealed to the public. Trump has experienced this recently.
In the routine tug-of-war between the president and the press, mutual respect was once the basic rule. That relationship rested on basic decency on both sides and a shared understanding of their role in serving the public. But Trump has failed to uphold it, leading to an unhappy standoff. It is worth remembering that this continuing hostility between the two sides does nothing for the American people.
