Media war heats up between Trump and America's largest networks

Christy Strawser (0:00)

The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else. I'm Christy Strawser, you're listening to Audacy's On Deadline.

Major networks banded together in solidarity and refused pool coverage of him after President Donald Trump barred unflattering sources of coverage from the White House. Here's the latest from WCCO in Minneapolis.

Scott Living (0:26)

A guy who's been in the press room himself, Scott Living, Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Comm at the University of Minnesota. Are we in uncharted territory where we're getting people that are being dismissed from the Corps?

SPEAKER_3 (0:41)

Well, it's certainly a proud tradition in American history of presidents complaining about the coverage that they receive. There's nothing new in that. What is not so proud is this new sort of length to which this president has decided to go, really without pretext. I mean, he even sort of slipped up and himself referred to it as a ban on the free press. This was Friday at a photo op. And it's always a little uneasy to have competitors working together, but they've agreed to do so on very clearly defined sort of rules. And in this case, I think the competitors of, in this case, CNN and MS Now and Politico, have said, you know what? We can't, if we let this happen and we don't respond, then all bets are off. And we have no independence from this most powerful person in the world whom we're covering. So it'll be interesting to see. It's notable that they are not ignoring the president. They're continuing to cover him. I don't think it would serve anybody to pretend that what a president does is not newsworthy. But what they aren't doing is providing this pool video and audio that really to some extent is something this president thrives on and has used to his advantage. So that's an interesting wrinkle. And of course, now the question is, what will the federal judge do in the suit that's been filed by these three news organizations? Will there be a temporary injunction or something more than that?

It won't be long before we know where this thing is going.

Scott Living (2:26)

I want to bring back, why should the general public care about this? I know news people care and it's frightening, but how big of an impact on this? What does this mean sort of to all of us at home?

SPEAKER_3 (2:42)

Well, I'm not really a bona fide First Amendment scholar, but, and I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think most people want to live in a country where there's a guy in charge.

Scott Living (2:54)

Whoever it is. Yeah, whoever it might be.

SPEAKER_3 (2:56)

Whatever side. Gets to say, I don't like the way you cover me, and so I'm not gonna let you do it anymore.

That, again, to my non-lawyerly mind, seems like a clear infringement on the free press of First Amendment freedom that we all have counted on, and we've never really lived without. I mean, previous presidents have certainly had their issues with the media, and notably the Obama White House at one point tried to exclude Fox News, but that was from a single event, and it didn't go well. And Obama backed down on that appropriately. This takes that to a new level. So do we want to let a president say, you can't cover me in a negative way? By the way, he has said that. He recently said, you know, they take what is really positive news and they put a negative spin on it, and he said, I think that's illegal.

I don't know of a lawyer anywhere who would agree with that, or any First Amendment scholar who would say that under our system, it's illegal, even if the news is, you know, reported in what you might subjectively call a negative fashion. That, as a rationale for banning media organizations, doesn't seem good for anybody.

Scott Living (4:22)

Feels like now there's so many different outlets. There's so much on social media that there's such a disbelief or a skepticism about what is and what isn't. It's super hard to kind of sift through that and say, well, what is the truth?

SPEAKER_3 (4:38)

No question. And I'm sorry to say that this trust is higher these days, I think, than ever before. And you're right.

It's hard to know what is news, what's analysis, what's opinion, what's outright entertainment, just telling people what they want to hear. Years ago, there were not as many organizations claiming to be disseminating, to be producing and disseminating news. Now, you have the Newsmaxes and the One American Network at the far right end of the spectrum, and then you have organizations like MS Now, one of those involved in this, that clearly occupy an advocacy or what it calls a perspective approach at the left side or at the left end of the spectrum. So it has gotten more complicated. There are so many more sources of information, including news. Yes, there is distrust. And certainly that distrust is compounded by a president who, you know, in both his terms, has said, you can't believe these people. You just need to listen to me. Their job is to tell you what a great job I'm doing. And if they don't, I will trash them. I will attack the individuals involved. I'll tell, you know, he calls White House correspondents by names, you know, the famous quiet piggy comment.