Matt Gertz

While some conservative media figures are speaking out against the Trump administration’s efforts to manipulate coverage and damage the institution of the press, many more can’t get enough of the way he treats journalists with utter contempt and grinds them into the dirt. And those opinions are mimicked by their audiences. Seventy-three percent of Republican voters approve of the way he talks about the media, according to a recent poll. Nearly four out of five trust President Trump more than the press to tell the truth.

But those views are wildly out of step with the rest of the American public, which overwhelmingly disapproves of Trump’s conduct and trusts him less than the media. This divide is the result of extremely successful efforts by Republican activists, politicians, and conservative media outlets to convince conservatives that the mainstream press is liberal and deceitful and that only avowed right-wing sources can be trusted to provide the facts.

Newt Gingrich has a new proposal for the Trump Administration’s efforts to delegitimize and weaken critical journalists: turn White House press briefings into a “town hall” format where presumably hand-picked citizens would join the “total left-wing propagandists” in the press corps, while banning the most critical reporters from asking questions.

Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, Fox News contributor, and sometime adviser to President Donald Trump, has urged the new administration to use the power of the White House to shatter the credibility and influence of the press. He previously said the administration should respond to critical coverage from CNN by blackballing a reporter for months and including more “courteous,” less “adversarial” journalists from local outlets, in addition to “propaganda organizations” like CNN and The New York Times.

[Commentary] On Jan 20, Donald Trump will swear the oath of office and become president of the United States. His ascent would not have been possible without the years of vitriol that the right-wing media directed at his predecessor. That hatred of President Barack Obama, and the related scorched-earth efforts to smother his agenda, prepared the way for Trump. Many Republican voters became, in the words of one conservative writer, “just increasingly divorced from reality” after spending years in the right-wing echo chamber.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is pushing back on reported efforts by the Trump Administration to privatize it, saying the proposal would have a “devastating effect” and that “the entire public media service would be severely debilitated.” CPB is a private nonprofit corporation that receives almost all of its funding from the federal government and distributes those funds as grants to public television and radio stations and their programs. It is the “single largest source of funding for public television and radio programming.” According to CPB’s statement, “The federal investment in public media is vital seed money -- especially for stations located in rural America, and those serving underserved populations where the appropriation counts for 40-50% of their budget. The loss of this seed money would have a devastating effect.”