Media Bias

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt held court with social media influencers as part of a special new media briefing before President Donald Trump commemorates his first 100 days of his second administration.

Among those in attendance on Monday before Tuesday’s anniversary were Sean Spicer, Trump’s first-ever White House press secretary, who now hosts a YouTube show.

Mr. Spicer, it’s good to see you here, my predecessor,” Leavitt said.

The Trump White House hosted its first official influencer briefing on Monday, April 28. The event marked a shift from traditional media engagement to include modern digital creators. The briefing, typically limited to credentialed journalists, opened its doors to content creators, political commentators and social media personalities.

Expanding beyond legacy media

Politicians always lie, and when those politicians are Democrats, they typically have the media on their side. But rarely have the Democrats had so much success in roping in the news media to misrepresent the facts so blatantly as they did in President Donald Trump’s first term regarding the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Future students of media and politics ought to study the coverage of TCJA as an extreme case in how partisans, acting together with a friendly media, can cause huge swaths of the public to believe verifiably false things.

Since becoming FCC chairman in late January, Carr has repeatedly poked the corporate owners of ABC, CBS and NBC — networks the president dislikes.

Conservatives have said they believe major networks suffer from extreme liberal bias and an intolerance toward opposing points of view. That has harmed America and resulted in a plummeting public trust in national news outlets, they assert, adding that FCC intervention may be justified.

CNN’s unintentional acts of public service deserve recognition.

Network anchor Abby Phillip, for example, alleged in total earnestness last week that the erosion of media credibility is driven largely by right-wing rhetoric, as opposed to anything members of the press have said or done.

As with many other Obama-voting millennials, I never had much use for conservative media. My political coming-of-age coincided with a moment when information streams were already splintering into deeply partisan lanes, a process that became supercharged in the MAGA era. Ascendant irritants like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk determined that delicate liberals were not their target demographic and never made much of an effort to bring us into the fold. No hard feelings, really.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his 2023 book, The Message, based on a 10-day West Bank trip, makes broad claims about Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. He focused his rhetoric on demonstrating that Israeli practices amount to apartheid by showing parallels to past South African and Jim Crow experiences. This enabled him to view Israel as engaging in “white supremacy.” 

The New York Times recently published a hissy fit about the White House allowing reporters into the Briefing Room who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. Here was the amazing protest sentence: “Longtime White House reporters say the result has been an erosion of their independence.”

The presence of a reporter who didn’t vote Democrat doesn’t “erode” the anti-Trump animus (“independence”) of liberal activist journalists. It might balance it, suggesting journalism and liberalism are not exactly the same thing.

Did Ukraine start the war with Russia? Is DOGE capable of cutting two trillion dollars from the Federal budget? Did the US send $50 million in condoms to Gaza? Were the January 6 insurrectionists traitors or patriots? The thunderous second Trump administration has introduced as much uncertainty as the last. And that’s on top of the enduring claims and counter-claims about the reality of climate change, the results of the 2020 election, and the matter of gender and sexuality. 

As she left the James S. Brady Briefing Room in early April, Natalie Winters, the newly minted White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room, tried to describe the relationship between the White House press corps’ old guard and the “new conservative media” who’ve entered the briefing room in the early days of the second Trump administration.