Howard Kurtz

As a career journalist who has known Donald Trump for more than three decades, Howard Kurtz is uniquely positioned to explain the enormous hostility between the president and the press—and how it is slowly destroying the media’s credibility.

The reality is that he receives the most overwhelmingly negative coverage of any president in modern times, is rarely credited for positive developments, and is routinely attacked by journalists who privately despise him as racist, sexist, authoritarian and mentally ill. The country’s top news organizations have targeted Trump with an unprecedented barrage of disparaging reporting and commentary, with many no longer making much attempt to hide their disdain. As Kurtz details in his book Media Madness, they have lurched into the opposition camp, are appealing to an anti-Trump base of readers and viewers, and fail to grasp how deeply they are distrusted by a wide swath of the country.

To be sure, the president hits back hard with his constant attacks on “fake news” and individual journalists to rouse his political base, create a useful foil and feed a narrative of him taking on the establishment. Sometimes, even his allies admit, his rhetoric goes too far. He secretly courts journalists off the record, even as he calls them stupid, nasty and losers, but is undermined by unnamed leakers in his own inner circle.

The bottom line is that many in the media view themselves as being on a mission to save the country from Trump’s excesses. But that is not journalism, and if they feel that way they should quit their jobs and become activists. There is polarization on both sides, but Kurtz, a lifelong journalist, says the business he loves may never recover from the Trump era.

What used to be confined to the political battlefield now has spread into every nook and cranny of American entertainment and culture. Late-night comics sacrifice comedy for political diatribes, no longer concerned about alienating half their audience. The same goes for celebrities who join protests and hijack award shows for political rants. As Howard Kurtz explains in rich detail, the NFL is consumed by debate over anthem protests, while baseball and basketball champions refuse to appear at the White House.

Much of this polarization revolves around President Trump, some of it stoked by the president as a political tactic and some of it the byproduct of the Hollywood culture. But it also extends to the tech world, to Facebook, Twitter and Google, all of which are run by left-leaning executives and all of which have been accused of bias against conservatives.

Ultimately, however inspired by Trump, the culture war has come to engulf all of us, as people who once shared cat pictures defriend each other on Facebook and unleash ugliness on Twitter.