Can the Media Fight Back Against Trump?

As we saw again this week, Donald Trump really seems to like to berate the media. The mogul's most recent target: "the phony and dishonest Washington Post," whose campaign press credentials he very publicly stripped on Monday.

But the truth is the real estate mogul loves the press. He feeds off the press and desperately needs the press to cover his presidential campaign. He's admitted as much himself: "I just don't think I need nearly as much money as other people need because I get so much publicity. I get so many invitations to be on television. I get so many interviews, if I want them," the presumptive Republican nominee boasted to Bloomberg News earlier this month.

In every election cycle, there's always a tug-of-war between political campaigns and the press corps that goes on behind the scenes—"working the ref," so to speak. But never in the modern media era has it played out so intensely and so publicly, with a candidate willing to openly block a whole laundry list of outlets whose reporting happens to prick his oh-so-thin skin. It includes not just the Post, whose editors declined to comment for this piece, but Politico, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, The Des Moines Register, the National Review and, for one debate, Fox News.

That hasn't, however, stopped those outlets or others from covering Trump—incessantly. Multiple studies have found that the real estate mogul dominated ink and airtime over the early months of the campaign. The New York Times reported on research showing that Trump earned nearly $2 billion worth of free media exposure through February, including social media (compared with just under $750 million for Hillary Clinton). Senior political journalists at a range of national publications and television news outlets acknowledged to Newsweek that the relationship with real estate tycoon, a savvy veteran of the New York tabloid world with a knack for cultivating press attention, is challenging media norms such as access, balance and fairness like nothing they've seen before. Despite this, there is little indication that change is afoot. As one editor at a national news publication observed, "the first three letters of news are n-e-w, and essentially everything Donald Trump has been doing is new."

The Trump campaign's ban on the Post grabbed headlines because it came with a formal announcement by the candidate himself, via Facebook, and because the paper is such a Washington institution. But Trump's bullying of the press is standard practice for the mogul. According to a senior decision-maker at a television network, the candidate threatened interview boycotts at two different networks unless they changed the reporters covering his campaign or how they covered him. "We didn't fold," the insider says, and neither did their competitor.

Trump's longest blockade of television media was his feud with Fox News's Megyn Kelly, prompting his boycott of the January 28 Republican debate that Fox hosted. He also refused to appear on Kelly's show for nine months, before participating in a gushy on-air make-up session in May. But Trump still appeared on other Fox programs during that time, and none of his other threats against television outlets have panned out, either because he folded or they did.

Print and web news outlets are a different story. "If you tell CNN they can't get credentialed, you're not appearing on CNN," points out Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post. Reporters for the liberal web-only outlet began getting denied credentials after the site decided to move Trump coverage to its entertainment section. If denying credentials to The Huffington Post "meant his name would no longer appear on our websites, then he would not do it," Grim says. The Huffington Post continues to cover the mogul's campaign, albeit without the access credentials afford; the coverage has since been moved back to the site's politics section.

Indeed, there's been no let up from blacklisted outlets. The day after Trump announced he was revoking the Post's credentials, the paper ran seven stories in its A section that mentioned the candidate in the headline. A look at Politico's website on Wednesday revealed that stories with Trump in the headline ranked as four of the top five "most read" of the inside-the-Beltway publication's stories. This despite the publication being blacklisted from Trump campaign events since writing a critical story on campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in March.

Even if a lack of credentials won't stop their reporting, political journalists say the symbolism of such attacks on the media is ominous. "When I was in Moscow, Vladimir Putin's Kremlin gave me credentials to cover his re-election campaign to a second term, even after several years of critical coverage of his crackdown on Russian media and rollback of democratic reforms," Politico editor Susan Glasser pointed out in a statement reacting to Trump's Post ban.

The network news journalist worries Trump is getting in the heads of his young reporters and correspondents. But what the GOP candidate is really trying to do, he says, is play to network executives. "He is hoping that by doing this, that the executives, who are all judged by bottom lines more than anything else, will increase pressure internally," the TV journalist says. Trump, it's worth noting, has relationships with many of those executives dating back to his years as a businessman and reality TV star. That pressure hasn't happened at his outlet, he says, but "it's scary stuff." And he thinks Trump has been empowered by the wall-to-wall coverage his campaign has been getting on cable news, as well as the wooing it has been receiving to give interviews. "Placating him early has only made him stronger," he says.

While speaking with Newsweek, both Glasser and Grim exhorted the political press corps to form a more united front against Trump. "I would certainly urge people to think of this as a problem that is warranting of collective action and collective concern, grave concern," Glasser says. At the same time, she's not surprised that it hasn't happened. "There's just so many different interests involved," she says.

New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen isn't surprised either. "The press's record in achieving solidarity like that is terrible," says Rosen. The Trump press corps could certainly say, "If you're going to deny The Washington Post, we're not going to show up," says Rosen—something that, given Trump's reliance on free media coverage, could give him pause. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank also called for a "blackout," of a sort, this week. "That would be smart to do, but it's almost impossible," says Rosen.

The national newspaper editor disagrees on this point. "What happens to the press corps is not my problem," he says. "I'm in this to produce stories that my readers care about." And that's where things get tricky in the news world. Judging by ratings and clicks, American's news audience very much wants to hear about Trump. If one thinks of the news business (and it is a business, despite some who expect it to operate more like a philanthropic venture) as an information marketplace, then basic economics apply. There appears to be a demand for Trump news, and outlets are supplying it in response. But where does the media draw the line between what's important for the public to know and what's gratuitous?

"The problem is it's not clear what the limiting principle would be for giving him less coverage," says Rosen. It's certainly not something he expects media outlets to sort out now, in the midst of the campaign, when all their infrastructure has kicked into high gear, moving toward covering the contest the same way they do every four years. And with Trump now the likely presidential nominee of a major American political party, it's hard to deny that the things he says matter.

But even before Trump started to lock up the nomination, the sheer amount of press coverage he was attracting was unprecedented, says Harvard professor Thomas Patterson. He's the author of a new report from Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that found that Trump earned $55 million in free media exposure from just eight national publications and news channels before the primaries even started. Jeb Bush was next in line, with $36 million worth of exposure. It's the only example Patterson's found "in the last 40 years or so that a candidate that low in the polls got that much attention" early on.

That is likely because of Trump's unscripted nature. "If you have a choice between a Ted Cruz event and a Donald Trump event, well, Cruz is going to say the same stump speech he's been saying for four months, while Trump, who the heck knows?" says the television journalist.

Still, the tide seems to be turning, at least a little. On Wednesday, all three cable news networks cut away from Trump's speech in Atlanta to go live to a Clinton roundtable. And the tenor of the Trump coverage seems to have turned more critical in recent weeks, as news outlets have moved away from the horse race coverage and focused heavily on Trump's fitness to be president. Trump's negative ratings—a Washington Post poll released Wednesday found 70 percent of Americans view him unfavorably—also don't suggest someone who's getting oodles of favorable media coverage. The real estate mogul certainly hasn't helped himself with incendiary remarks about the judge handling a lawsuit against him, President Barack Obama's response to the Orlando massacre or reiterating his call to ban Muslim immigrants.

But just because the press is churning out aggressive Trump coverage doesn't end the conundrums his campaign presents. The challenge now, says the newspaper editor, "is to achieve balance." Take the Post: On the same day, June 14, that it ran seven stories with Trump in the headline, it had just one headline in its front section that mentioned Clinton. The problem for political reporters is that on one side, there is a candidate, Clinton, who has been thoroughly vetted over a 20-plus-year career in national politics. And then there's Trump, where it's "all untilled soil," as the editor says. There is simply more to say that's new about Trump than there is about Clinton, at least from a political perspective. And you know what they say about the first three letters in news.