Trump splits the press

5 more days till Trump makes history again

President Trump’s return to the White House has split the press. On one side is a propaganda press that wishes to continue merrily chirping whatever the Party Line is today. On the other side, some owners of these outlets have their doubts about their staff and seek changes. This comes amid a sea change in the economics of the media—both news and otherwise.

The biggest battleship in the left’s fleet in Washington is the Jeff Bezos Post, but it is a relic in an age of aircraft carriers and drones. The Post adjusted to being a news cycle behind in the age of television, but Twitter is faster and deeper than TV. Stories rise and are instantly vetted as the nation becomes its own newsroom. It is fascinating.

The change is inspirational.

The winter wildfires in LA brought that home. Before the endless panels on cable news channels could utter “climate change,” Twitter users had shredded the narrative with reports of a 117 million-gallon water reservoir being emptied before fire season began, a city fire department budget cut and a $300,000-a-year diversity officer defending incompetence on Twitter.

On the last note, the pesky New York Post reported:

In a video defending the department’s DEI hiring practices, Deputy Chief Kristine Larson—who heads the Equity and Human Resources Bureau—addressed accusations that female firefighters aren’t strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building.

Her response: “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”

I think Chico in Chico and the Man articulated it better by saying, “ees no my job, man.”

The story ran days after I saw the video on Twitter.

My favorite mainstream tweet was from CBS: “As L.A. fires burn, officials work to counter false rumors and misinformation.”

I think the better solution would be to just put out the fires.

The media that once championed Twitter hates it now. Adam Carolla spoke for me:

All you f'ing pu**ies out there that have your panties in a bunch because these guys are going to be able to speak freely now, go F yourself 1000 times with 1000 rusty mop handles. You're now worried about misinformation and disinformation after you've been creating it all for the past 10 years? Give me a f'ing break. You're pissed off because you can't control the narrative, not because the narrative is dangerous. It's only about control. You guys were wrong about everything. You had control and you forced everyone to capitulate. Now you don't have control, and you hate it. It's insane that they even have the gall to feign that they're upset about this new thing and how dangerous it is when people start making their own decisions.

Most of the traditional news media busied themselves during the fires by “fact-checking” conservatives who had pointed out Democrats run California and Los Angeles. David Muir of Disney’s ABC was too busy tightening his raincoat with a clothespin to play that game.

The media fellows who actually own media outlets have their doubts about continuing down that one-way road to irrelevance.

Comedian Eric Abbenante tweeted with a video:

LA Times owner admits endorsing Karen Bass was a mistake. Pat Soon-Shiong: “We’ll accept some blame. LA Times: We endorsed Karen Bass. That’s a mistake, we admit that. Maybe we should think about how we elect people.

“I'm glad that's been taken up as almost a meme: That Competence Matters.”

It’s 2025, and Democrats are just figuring out that Competence Matters. Maybe in 2028. They’ll figure out men can’t get pregnant.

Jeff Bezos is culling the herd at his Post with a few buyouts and a few self-deportations. Jennifer Rubin, a Weekly Standard alum who morphed into WaPo’s in-house Never Trumper (after George Will, of course) left in a huff for Substack on Monday.

She wrote, “Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.”

The cliché is to substitute bureaucracy for democracy and you get what she means.

The New Republic was upset that the Bezos Post is OK with most of the president’s men and women.

TNR whined, “The Washington Post’s editorial board made the mind-boggling decision Monday to say they support all but four of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, and their rationales were as unconvincing as they were brief.”

Never considered, of course, is the people elected President Trump to run the government and these are the people he chose to do so. Lloyd Austin was confirmed with only two no votes. Democrats are determined to block any and all Cabinet members. The Bezos Post says, well, only four should be blocked.

The answer is none. Not a one should be blocked because a peaceful transfer of power is just that. Grace is a virtue.

Trump is pushing back. He succeeded in collecting $15 million (plus a million for his lawyers) from Disney’s ABC after George Stephanopoulos repeatedly lied about a jury finding Trump guilty of rape.

The message to news organizations is clear: You lie, you pay.

The New York Times reported:

Multiple media organizations are evaluating whether they have enough insurance coverage to absorb a potential wave of libel and other litigation from officials who have already shown an inclination to file such suits.

And a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet is preparing for the possibility that the government will investigate issues like whether its use of freelancers complies with labor regulations.

With President-elect Donald J. Trump returning to the White House, media outlets large and small are taking steps to prepare for what they fear could be a legal and political onslaught against them from the new administration and Mr. Trump’s allies inside and outside the government.

I welcome reporters to the place they created: No Man Is Above The Lawland, where even a president is tried for a crime that carries no penalty and no jail time. Yes, he was convicted of 34 imaginary felonies.

Defamation penalties are real, however.

The reason Trump sues the media for defamation is that they defame him. They also try to cover their tracks. They are not very good at that. Semafor reported:

The Pulitzer Board, facing a lawsuit from Donald Trump over its Pulitzer Prize for stories on Russian election interference in 2016, based its decision to stand by that reporting on a confidential review—a review that Semafor has learned was written by former Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen Adler.

The New York Times and the Washington Post won a prize in 2018 for coverage of the Russian interference operation and “its connections to the Trump campaign.” In 2022, the now-president elect sued the board after it refused to retract the prize.

Now Adler’s review is at the heart of Trump’s attempt to literally relitigate media coverage of his 2016 election win in an Okeechobee, Florida, court.

The Pulitzer Board had fought to keep Adler’s report and his identity secret, but confirmed his role after Adler disclosed it in response to a question from Semafor.

Just rescind the awards and pay the man.

But no. The media seems it never say sorry. Trump is making them sorry when they don’t. Some publications are vetting their stories. NYT’s story also said:

After Mr. Trump’s victory in November, Alex Ip, the publisher of The Xylom, a science-focused news site that writes about big energy companies, began having outside lawyers review articles before publication. His fear is that subjects of critical articles will harass the site with retaliatory litigation.

“We’ve already seen an escalating trend of journalists being targeted by both Republican and Democratic local administrations prior to the election,” Mr. Ip wrote in an email. “However, after the election, my personal judgment is that we cannot afford *not doing* prepublication review for these stories anymore, because the risk is too large, especially from far-right bad actors.”

Libel lawsuits and leak investigations are traditional threats. But many lawyers are concerned that the Trump administration will pursue less conventional tactics to intimidate or punish news organizations.

During his first presidency, reporters thought they could intimidate him. After the 2020 election, reporters thought they could finish him off. Now they fear him because he keeps winning.

Here’s an idea—one that Bezos and Soon-Shiong may like—how about treating Trump like a normal president? Maybe 77,303,573 Americans knew what they were doing when they elected him again.