The relationship between the media and the Trump White House has been controversial. This aroused distrust and led to a disturbing increase in physical and verbal threats against journalists. The threats were aided by Trump’s continued encouragement to his supporters of ‘fake news’ and the pressure on the press as ‘the enemy of the people’.
“I’m not the only reporter who has discussed this White House who has had death threats,” Jim Acosta, CNN’s White House correspondent on “Reliable Sources”, said Sunday. “We can not be in a place in this country where political reporters, White House correspondents, need bodyguards to cover political campaign events.”
Like many other reporters, Acosta has had a fair share of the team over the years. One dispute at a news conference in 2018 led to Trump and his associates revoking Acosta’s White House press card, which was later reinstated after a court ruled in CNN’s favor in a legal dispute. It was an unprecedented act of a president who, according to many people, endangers the protection of the first amendment for journalists.
But the impact of Trump’s repeated attacks does not end there. It has also sunk into the hearts and minds of a number of Americans, who now doubt that new sources are trusted or directly condemn the fact-checked media and reporters as propaganda machines against the president. Because of misinformation and conspiracy theories, fewer Americans are concerned about what has been proven to be true and false.
The outcome of Trump’s hostility to the news media over the years has been shocking. This caused confidence in the press to disappear and at the same time sowed seeds of skepticism that took shape in the form of demands for election fraud, fraud and hesitation against vaccines.
“It’s just a pervasive hostility and anti-democratic hostility to the process that I just hope we will never receive such goods again,” Acosta said. “It is just as damaging and destructive to our democracy”.