From “Fake News” to Full Control: How the GOP Trained the Media to Serve Its Narrative

A 30-year campaign of intimidation turned watchdogs into lapdogs, and now the consequences are impossible to ignore…

Yesterday morning, standing in the Oval Office, Donald Trump declared that the war with Iran — a war he started without a declaration of Congress, apparently at the urging of MBS and his son-in-law who takes $25 million a year from Saudi Arabia — is “won,” and then added that “the only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news.”

Iran, for its part, flatly denied that any negotiations are even taking place. And the network news covered it just like that: Trump says the war is won, Iran says it isn't, here's the weather.

Nobody on camera yesterday morning even bothered to ask why Jared Kushner, who was simultaneously soliciting a fresh $5 billion from the Saudis who lobbied hardest for this war, was one of the people at the table in Geneva when the last chance for a deal collapsed.

That omission isn't an accident. It’s the result of a thirty-year Republican strategy to bully the press into docility, and it’s long past time for Democrats to fight back using the exact same playbook.

An old friend dropped me a note this week with a complaint that, once you hear it, you can’t stop noticing everywhere you look in our nation’s media. He’d been watching one of the three major network TV evening newscasts and noticed that Trump and other Republicans are on every single night, almost always without serious pushback or fact-checking, while Democrats are rarely featured at all.

When a Democrat does show up, it’s usually to react to something Trump just did or said, a process that reinforces the Republican frame of the news even when it pushes back against it (see: George Lakoff).

I’ve been in the media much of my life; was a radio news reporter for a top station in the 1970s and have been writing books and articles about democracy and politics regularly for the past three decades: what my friend is describing is neither an accident nor a coincidence.

It’s the fully ripened fruit of a successful strategy Republicans have been running to get the media to spin stories for them since the early 1980s. And it’s long past time for Democrats to stand up and fight back hard with exactly the same playbook.

Back during the 1992 Clinton/Bush Sr. presidential race, Rich Bond, then chairman of the GOP, explained his party’s media strategy with unusual candor:

“There is some strategy to it,” he said of their habit of bashing the so-called liberal media. “If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs.’ Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

Lee Atwater had been running a version of this strategy for years before Bond said the quiet part out loud. The genius of it was that they never needed to prove that the media was actually infected with “liberal bias.”

Which was good for them, because the mainstream media’s never really had any sort of political bias other than status quo; it’s just that the GOP has relied on so many lies over the years like “trickle down,” “murderous immigrant invasion,” “evil union bosses,” “non-citizens voting,” “queer predators,” etc., etc., that when they get confronted with reality it seems to them like bias.

All they needed was for the accusation to be repeated often enough that journalists and producers would end up sufficiently intimidated to lean over backward to prove they weren’t pushing a liberal line. And it worked.

Media scholar Eric Alterman documented the phenomenon in detail at the Center for American Progress: conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Bob Novak had prominent perches all over the allegedly “liberal” media showing up on major TV programs weekly, while genuinely progressive voices like Paul Krugman and E.J. Dionne almost never got television slots.

A study comparing Sunday morning talk shows during Obama’s first two years versus Trump’s first two years (first time around) found that by the Trump era, every single major Sunday show, including NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, was featuring more Republicans than Democrats. And a FAIR analysis found Republicans outnumbering Democrats 56% to 40% in Sunday show appearances during Trump’s first post-election transition period.

Here’s how effectively this strategy worked: When Bush was president, the networks said they “needed more Republicans” on television because “Republicans are in power.” When Obama was president, they said they “needed more Republicans” on TV “because Democrats were in charge,” and “it’s important to hear from the opposition.”

Heads Republicans win, tails Democrats lose, every single time, under almost every conceivable circumstance and on pretty much every topic. That’s not journalism. That’s genuine media bias. In favor of the GOP.

And while that particular scheme was playing out, the billionaires on the hard right were simultaneously building media empires of their own that now include roughly 1,500 rightwing radio stations, Fox “News,” Newsmax, One America News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, more than half of America’s local newspapers, and now, CBS itself.

Meanwhile, CNN may soon land in the hands of the same billionaire nepo-baby buyer, reportedly eager to move it in a similar direction. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

Even the White House and Pentagon press pools, once home to credentialed reporters from established outlets, are now packed with “reporters” from fringe rightwing websites and sketchy podcasts, while serious journalists and representatives of progressive outlets often find themselves locked out.

The hypocrisy here, particularly since the media now either ignores or treats Trump family and cabinet corruption as something normal, is breathtaking.

For example, Jared Kushner has been simultaneously acting as Trump’s Middle East “peace envoy” while raising a new $5 billion round of investment from the same foreign governments he’s supposedly negotiating with.

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), already pumped $2 billion into Kushner’s private equity firm right after he left the first Trump White House, and pays him $25 million a year in management fees.

According to reporting in The Washington Post, MBS was making private phone calls to Trump for weeks before the bombing of Iran started, urging him to strike, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s chief regional rival.

Kushner himself met with Iran’s foreign minister in Geneva just before the bombs fell. Iran’s foreign minister later said a deal “was within reach,” suggesting Kusnher may have been playing them for suckers on behalf of MBS and/or Netanyahu (an old Kushner family friend).

Senators Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin have called for investigations into whether Kushner violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Not to mention policies against nepotism. And that’s Trump’s peace envoy. That’s the person steering American foreign policy toward a war that explicitly benefits and may even be being fought — at the cost of American lives and treasure — on behalf of his biggest client.

At the same time, Qatar handed Trump a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 jumbo jet to ultimately keep for himself and you and I are now paying a billion dollars to outfit it. Multiple constitutional law scholars have called it a textbook violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval.

The New York Times has reported that Trump has already personally pocketed at least $1.4 billion from the presidency through his family’s various business deals; other investigations suggest the number could be well over $4 billion.

The administration has also been killing people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean — at least 151 people killed in 45 strikes since last September — including at least one Colombian fisherman, all without a declaration of war or congressional authorization. And then they bombed and invaded Venezuela, killing more than 80 people including civilians, seizing its president without any legal authority whatsoever under international law.

Now, consider what would have happened if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton had done any of this? What if Clinton’s son-in-law had taken $2 billion from a foreign government and then whispered in Clinton’s ear to start a war that benefited that same foreign government? What if Obama had accepted a $400 million jet from Qatar? What if a Democratic administration had been killing people on boats in international waters without congressional authorization?

Republicans would have been incandescent, holding news conferences and hearing after hearing after hearing. Fox “News” would have run wall-to-wall of outraged coverage for months. The Sunday shows would have featured nothing but Republicans demanding impeachment or worse.

And the mainstream media would have covered those hearings seriously and continuously, because they’d have been terrified of being called “liberal” if they didn’t.

That’s the mechanism. That’s how it works. Republicans institutionalized the accusation of “liberal media bias” so thoroughly that the media now polices itself on their behalf, even when the corruption on the other side is jaw-dropping.

The solution to this media crisis that’s so damaging to our democracy is straightforward, and Democrats need to do it now.

Every senator, every congressperson, every governor, every mayor, every Democratic surrogate who goes on television needs to be trained to say the words “rightwing media bias” early and often, not occasionally, but constantly, institutionally, the same way Republicans “worked the refs” for thirty years.

It means pressuring the networks directly. It means holding hearings — even if they have to be unofficial “shadow” hearings — right now about media consolidation and the capture of the press corps by rightwing interests. It means pointing out, loudly and specifically, every single time a network gives a Republican five minutes of uncontested airtime and then gives a Democrat thirty seconds to “respond.”

Republicans didn’t spend forty years bleating about the “liberal media” because the liberal media actually existed. They knew it didn’t but were relentless about the accusation nonetheless, and they had the infrastructure to amplify it everywhere, all the time.

Democrats can do the same thing today, and unlike the GOP, they have the truth on their side.

This starts with you. Call your Democratic senators and representatives today and demand they raise this issue publicly and loudly, in press conferences, in hearings, in every television interview. Share this article. Talk with your neighbors about it.

The refs change their calls when the voices get loud enough. It’s time to start speaking out loudly.

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.