Quotes About Media

fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment about Scaramucci's accusation that he sucked his own cock.)

Trump's entire world was construed from what he saw on television.

For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur's book about the campaign,

With his misspellings and his use of 1970s lingo—"wire tapping" called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth Avenue—it seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed to hoist himself by, from the point of view of the media, intelligence community, and extremely satisfied Democrats, the wiretap tweets had pulled him highest and most left him dangling in ignorance and embarrassment

The story of Trump was the story of how he tried to make himself a story.

But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself.

By Sunday evening, a feeling perhaps most reminiscent of election night 2016, desolate and confounded, spread through the mainstream media, the liberal establishment, and among all those who were confident that they had surrounded Donald Trump and left him nowhere to run. This was—and there could hardly be any better illustration—defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

There was no happenstance news, in Trump's view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the "fake news" label. "I've made stuff up forever, and they always print it," he bragged.

The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.

Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collectively mind decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one of a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media was the last word.

Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval.

And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin—anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms—of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame—he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame.

To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral stand.

He was postliterate—total television.

He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down.

The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.

The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.

Much of the president's daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various anchors and hosts had said about him.

He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.

If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.

Still, Sean Hannity had 5.8 million viewers on the night of the Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh hearing. "That's a lot of fucking hobbits," said Bannon.

Bannon's deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions.

It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn't put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater, Benghazi, Emailgate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers.

They take everything I've ever said and exaggerate it," said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. "It's all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.