Washington Post

Print isn’t dead. But the soaring cost of newsprint is contributing to the slow death of America’s newspapers. A months-long spike in the price of paper, driven by federal tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Canadian suppliers, is slamming newspapers at a time when the news about the news industry wasn’t very good to begin with.

Don’t believe your eyes and ears. Believe only me. That has been President Trump’s message to the public for the past two years, pounded in without a break: The press is the enemy. The news is fake. President Donald Trump has done his best to prepare the ground for a moment like Aug 21. In a divided, disbelieving nation, will this really turn out to be the epic moment it looks like? Or will Trump’s intense, years-long campaign to undermine the media — and truth itself — pay off now, in the clutch? 

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “We have no knowledge of any of this.” The second came in January of 2018, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that President Trump denied all the allegations and any payments.

As national media organizations contemplate how to mitigate their trust deficit with the American people, a solution emerges from the 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey: Bag the coverage of President Donald Trump and Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency, and go wall-to-wall on zoning hearings, bus-route changes, liquor-license revocations and softball games. Local news, that is. The survey, after all, shows that people trust sources of local reporting far more than national outlets.

President Donald Trump sought to clarify how much of the press he sees as “the enemy of the people.” He put it at about 80 percent. During an interview at the White House with Fox News, he was asked: “Is the press the enemy of the people?” “No, not at all. But the fake news is,” President Trump told Ainsley Earhardt of “Fox & Friends.” “And the fake news is comprised of — it’s a lot. It’s a big chunk, okay? Somebody said, ‘What’s the chunk?’ I said, ‘80 percent.’ It’s a lot. It’s a lot. If I do something well, it’s not reported.