Trump vs the media. Why the media keeps losing.
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-versus-media-548562
It is the Trump view that the media has been so wrong in its predictions, and made to look in the eyes of the public so woeful and ludicrous, that it must now double down in an effort to prove its thesis about the president and restore its honor. (The Trump White House now hammers a persistent theme: Why was nobody fired in the mainstream media for such dunderheaded election coverage?)
The media strategy is to show Trump to be an inept and craven sociopath. The Trump strategy is to show that media people are hopeless prigs out of touch with the nation (e.g., CNN’s media correspondent, Brian Stelter, who turns to the camera every Sunday morning and delivers a pious sermon about Trump’s perfidiousness) and nursing personal grudges.
Accordingly, “alternative facts.” It’s curious to pick a battle whose outcome won’t change anything—like over the actual size of the inaugural crowd. But both sides grabbed it. Hence, the argument becomes about relative reaction. Who is perceived as overreacting more? Whose apoplexy is greater?
In the media’s view—literal to a fault, in this instance—a lie is a lie. Therefore, Trump is a liar, making the issue of the size of the inaugural crowd a moral one. Trump’s misstatement is grievous and profoundly discreditable, in this view.
In the Trump team’s view, that the media would turn a so-what issue into a veritable crisis of confidence—and that it rises to this level of high dudgeon on such a regular basis—discredits the media and adds to its crisis of credibility, which is at least as great—and, the Trump team, would argue vastly greater—as its own.
