Bluesky

As President Donald Trump’s approval numbers continue to plummet—he’s now clocked his first-ever majority of male poll respondents giving a thumbs-down—he’s reached for the pet crusade of all right-wing demagogues losing public favor: a culture war against the press. Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the Trump White House debuted its media bias tracker—a laundry list of alleged press outrages committed against the righteous, truth-telling MAGAfied executive branch.

As an exercise in media criticism, the bias tracker is sorely wanting. It itemizes ostensible distortions and falsehoods perpetrated by news outlets but doesn’t bother to supply textual hyperlinks to the stories in question, except in a motley array of “sources” at the end of each entry. Doubtless the rationale here is to deprive the coverage of clicks, but the practice also alleviates the grudge-bearing authors of the site from needing to cite context, disclaiming language, and the White House’s own responses in the main text. The other sources marshaled as putative citations are the White House’s own social media diatribes and fellow-traveling merchants of social-media outrage such as the Libs of Tiktok X site. As a result, the site’s content analysis replicates the firehose-style dudgeon of right-wing social media, as a tour of its lead categories of putative bias instantly confirms: “Lie,” “Misrepresentation,” “Omission of Context,” “Malpractice,” and by far the most commonly cited trespass, “Bias.”

In this cauldron of cultural affront, the actual substance of the coverage cataloged on the site is crowded out. Take the lead entry, which presumes to document how the “Media Misrepresents and Exaggerates President Trump’s Calls for Democrat [sic] Accountability” in relation to the video that six veteran Democratic Congress members recorded to remind service members that they can and should refuse to obey illegal orders.

The “offense,” the White House claims, is that “the media misrepresented President Trump’s call for Members of Congress to be held accountable for inciting sedition by saying that he called for their ‘execution.’” And the scorned “truth” of the matter, the site continues, is that “the Democrats and Fake News Media subversively implied that President Trump had issued illegal orders to service members. Every order President Trump has issued has been lawful. It is dangerous for sitting Members of Congress to incite insubordination in the United States’ military, and President Trump called for them to be held accountable.” 

The means of accountability that Trump endorsed is, of course, not mentioned here; his Truth Social claim was that the lawmakers were guilty of “seditious behavior” that was “punishable by death”; for good measure, he recirculated a post from a supporter proclaiming, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”

It’s an immediate tell here that the alleged “truth” at the bottom of the dispute is simply a restatement of the White House’s grievance. It means nothing to contend that press outlets “subversively implied” that Trump’s orders to the armed services are illegal. In reporting the video’s content, news organizations are not implying anything, subversively or otherwise—they’re presenting the issue at hand. And generally speaking, they haven’t done nearly enough to document the full scale of lawlessness perpetrated by the Trump White House under bogus military and national security pretexts. The unprovoked attacks on allegedly drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific have now claimed more than 80 fatalities, with no public documentation of the administration’s claims and no congressional authorization of the attacks. Indeed, Congress is now investigating the reports that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized a second attack during the initial September 2 raid so as to kill the two survivors who were clinging to the boat’s wreckage—a charge that, if proven, would be a war crime—if the United States were at war.

It’s also now come to light that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defied a federal court order forbidding the transfer of detained Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT maximum-security prison—at the same place where she earlier recorded a torture-porn video—falsely claiming that international rendition and detainment “are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security” and no business of “activist judges.” Oh, and the whole legal rationale for these deportations—that members of Venezuela’s Tren De Aragua and represent a first-order threat to national security under the Alien Enemies Act—is also unconstitutional, per the ruling of a Trump-appointed federal judge.

And these are just the Trump-sanctioned illegalities of the last news cycle. The ongoing illegal mobilization of federal troops in cities and states governed by Trump’s political opponents, together with warrantless raids and detentions carried out by masked ICE goons and Customs and Border Patrol agents are basic assaults on civil liberties and due process guarantees, and overwhelmingly victimize residents without prior criminal records. The handiwork of DOGE and Trump’s quisling appointees like Kari Lake and Linda McMahon in dismantling federal agencies with statutory mandates is also plainly illegal, as is the Trump family’s long history of corrupt self-enrichment schemes.

It’s no surprise that, in the face of this Mafia-like governing record, Trump and his enablers should fixate on a group of Democratic lawmakers reminding people of how the rule of law is supposed to work. Yet, even within this absurdly narrow compass, the White House bias tracker is unable to contain its will-to-vituperation long enough to make a consistent point. In claiming that the press has somehow cunningly abetted the claims of the Congress members, the site features a video at the top of the page including snippets from the video and cutting off the statements with a loudly thudding red stamp emblazoning “SEDITIOUS” across their faces. 

In the act of claiming utmost media victimhood for itself, the Trump White House can’t resist blaring out the substance of Trump’s own case to snuff out his political opponents. Instead, it wraps the whole entry up with another dogmatic falsehood: “President Trump has never issued an illegal order. The Fake News knew that, but ran with the story anyway.”

This has always been the logic behind the American right’s half-century-long crusade against the alleged perfidies of “liberal bias” in the press: Instead of pressing for tangible reforms such as serious fact-checking or enhanced public accountability (let alone public ownership) for the corporate media, the chief demand is for media outlets to dutifully echo right-wing agitprop. This was the clear demand of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s 1972 broadside against the elite East Coast media for the thought crime of reporting on the US war in Vietnam, and the basic coordinates of the bias lament on the right haven’t altered since. This has entailed no small amount of manifest absurdities, such as the recent defunding of a public media infrastructure that disproportionately benefits audience in red-voting rural communities, and a determination to divine Maoist messaging in all manner of bloated Hollywood offerings. Yet such victimization narratives are irresistible to a conservative movement that has long deflected attention from its unpopular governing program with the stirring refrains of unappeasable culture warfare.

And sure enough, the White House bias tracker is steeped in rudderless affront-taking. It castigates an opinion piece published in the Beltway trade rag The Hill (and in the process misdescribes the freelance author as a reporter) for using an image of National Guard troops in DC from the Biden administration. Once again, the substance of the piece—which correctly maintained that Trump was abusing his powers to eclipse the authority of local political leaders in Washington and other cities he’s targeted—was disregarded in favor of the whiny assertion that “The Hill used an image of law enforcement agents from Joe Biden’s Presidency to inaccurately portray President Trump’s law enforcement efforts as ‘autocratic.’”

A basic acquaintance with news production on the web would lead any notionally honest interlocutor to conclude that the packagers of this piece resorted to an older image because Trump’s full National Guard deployment was then still in progress. What’s more, the image in question dates from March 2021 and depicts the mobilization of the National Guard in the nation’s capital in response to the Trump-led coup attempt of January 6. (That deployment was originally slated for 60 days but was extended in response to a credible threat of continued MAGA-aligned violence in DC.) In other words, Trump’s vigilant bias trackers are claiming that The Hill’s editors maliciously targeted the wrong example of Trump-instigated violence targeting the nation’s capital.

It goes on like this, in a monotonous refrain of offense-taking that only a true Trump sycophant can sustain. You have CBS Mornings host Nate Burleson hauled up on the charge of seizing the “opportunity to politicize the Charlie Kirk assassination” when his offense was asking former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy whether this was a suitable moment to reflect on the right’s rhetoric endorsing and celebrating violence. Never mind that McCarthy was free to answer in the negative, as he indeed did. This was prime grievance fodder in the right-wing mediasphere, where calls for reflection are treated like kryptonite and leftists are always and forever the faithless violent insurrectionists. And you have this unthinkable defilement of Real American virtue: “The View’s Whoopi Goldberg Makes Up a Song to Slam Trump for Building White House Ballroom.” The countervailing “key point” here is “ABC’s The View criticized President Trump for improving the White House complex despite the ample precedence for the improvements.” Yet again, restating a grievance in a vacuum is tendered as a simulacrum of fact-checking. This parody of media criticism would be merely laughable if Trump wasn’t also abusing his powers and regulatory authority to remake the corporate media in his own image. The right-wing media-bias complex may be a joke, but as the Trump administration is supercharging it, the joke will ultimately be on all of us.