From the inception of Donald Trump’s political career, journalists have found it necessary to police each other, to insist that any notion of objectivity or balance with Trump was a grievous sin, a corrupt attempt to “normalize” an abnormally dangerous candidate.
Now that Trump is in his second term, a few rare voices have floated the novel concept that to combat cratering trust in media, there should be attempts at balance. Mediaite founder Dan Abrams was interviewed for the Mediaite podcast and proclaimed that journalists should occasionally say something positive about Trump, or give him credit for something. Perish the thought!
“I do think there is a level of Trump Derangement Syndrome among some that they are completely incapable of giving him credit for anything,” Abrams said. “And you want to restore credibility? Try and call balls and strikes. Give him credit when it’s warranted, recognize successes. I think that allows you then the freedom to criticize as well.”
On the other side of that debate is ex-CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy. He was a logical guest for On The Media, a weekly radio show out of NPR affiliate WNYC in New York. In 2023, their host Brooke Gladstone warmly touted The Communist Manifesto as a “stalwart text” while that station draws millions of dollars each year from American taxpayers.
When the Republicans in Washington consider defunding public broadcasting, they should always consider this: government-funded NPR and PBS actively lobby their colleagues to trash Republicans relentlessly, and agitate the media bosses against any backsliding into moderation, like refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
Darcy complained CNN’s Inauguration Day coverage was intolerably soft: “None of the CNN anchors pointed out that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon to take that office. They didn't point out that he was twice impeached. You had a lot of right-wing extremists and a lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists stuffed in the Rotunda,” and it wasn’t “called out.”
This was compared to Jake Tapper speechifying after Trump’s defeat in 2020: “It must be said, to paraphrase President Ford, for tens of millions of our fellow Americans, their long national nightmare is over.”
WNYC host Micah Loewinger added: “You argue that Jake Tapper's limp coverage embodies a larger trend that we're seeing in the news media, which is retreating from aggressive coverage of Donald Trump. You likened the phenomenon to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1956 horror film.”
In that movie, space aliens were the “pod people” who replaced humans with emotionless duplicates. This implied Darcy was missing the free-flowing Trump hatred that spews “convicted felon” and “twice-impeached” and “January 6” in every other sentence.
Darcy mourned CNN was no longer run by Jeff Zucker, who “really encouraged anchors to be relentless, to be vocal about the lies that Donald Trump was pushing.” The new boss, Mark Thompson, told anchors in a meeting “the network should be open-minded about Trump and showing a little deference.”
Loewinger asked if he actually said “deference.” Darcy was gilding the lily.
But in Darcy’s brain space, it’s the “reality-dwelling public” that relies on The New York Times and the “MAGA base” that finds The Times to be insufferably leftist. The guardians of “reality” are the wokest ones crusading inside these newspapers and TV and radio networks to employ the most inflammatory (and self-congratulatory) language about resisting Trump as a fascist threat to democracy.
They don’t care about polls showing declining trust in media. They end up advocating the path to bankruptcy for media businesses, admiring themselves like Jim Acosta in every inflammatory passage.
