Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over Truth

The mainstream media’s obsessive hatred for President Trump outruns his anti-media fixation by a country mile, argues this evenhanded and incisive study of press relations with the Trump administration. Kurtz (Reality Show), host of Fox News’s Media Buzz and an ex-Washington Post media reporter, surveys innumerable battles between a president who pillories the press as purveyors of “fake news” and enemies of the people (while ardently schmoozing them) and the liberal media that passionately return the hate. (“Is Donald Trump Simply the Worst Human Being We Can Imagine?” mused one Salon headline.) Drawing on his long acquaintance with Trump and interviews with journalists and White House figures, Kurtz stays neutral in the fray, noting the untruths and nonsense spewed by the president along with the distortions, exaggerations, and, indeed, fake news purveyed by his detractors. He also paints a vivid portrait of White House infighting and leaks, with sympathetic profiles of Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, and other staffers who have tried to restrain Trump’s inflammatory tweets and extinguish the ensuing media firestorms. Alongside Kurtz’s lively, entertaining narrative of vitriolic news cycles is a penetrating critique of a liberal news establishment that, he contends, has abandoned objectivity for a hysterical partisanship that galvanizes Trump’s support among the conservative voters it disdains. (Jan.)