Donald Trump’s attacks on the media may have backfired

By THE DATA TEAM

BASHING America’s legacy media organisations may be Donald Trump’s most consistent hobby. America’s president has repurposed the term “fake news”, which originally referred to online political-disinformation campaigns, to apply to all unfavourable coverage of his administration, regardless of its veracity. Since his inauguration, he has used the term in 258 different tweets—one out of every 16 messages he has sent on the platform as president.

On July 29th Mr Trump invoked his favourite scapegoat once again. The president described as “very good and interesting” a meeting with the publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, in which he claimed they “spent much time talking about…[how] Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’” (Mr Sulzberger later said he had implored the president during their meeting to tone down his rhetoric regarding the press, lest it incite violence against journalists.) Shortly thereafter, Mr Trump fired off a series of tweets claiming that the “failing” New York Times and “Amazon” Washington Post —so nicknamed because Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, owns the newspaper—are “dying”, and that “confidence in the media is at an all time low”.

So far, however, Mr Trump’s broadsides have failed to dent faith in his targets. On behalf of The Economist, during the past three years YouGov, a pollster, has asked a representative sample of Americans to rate large American news organisations on a scale from “very trustworthy” to “very untrustworthy”. (We calculate net trustworthiness on a scale of -100 to 100 from a weighted average of “very trustworthy” (100), “trustworthy” (50), “neither trustworthy or untrustworthy” (0), “untrustworthy” (-50) and “very untrustworthy” (-100).) From October 15th 2016, shortly before he was elected, to this month, confidence in Mr Trump’s two most frequently targeted newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, has actually grown. During the same period, trust in two media outlets that offer him reliably fawning coverage, Fox News and Breitbart, has withered.

This trend is not only a product of liberal readers flocking to publications criticised by the president they revile. Instead, trust in America’s mainstream print media has improved across the political spectrum. Unsurprisingly, people who said they would or did vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 now trust the Times and Post more, and Fox less, than they did two years ago. Yet even among people who support the president, net trust of Mr Trump’s bêtes noires has increased, albeit by much smaller amounts. Meanwhile, during the past two years, the New York Times’ monthly online readership has doubled to 130m. If anything is failing, it appears to be Mr Trump’s campaign to undermine trust in the press, not the Gray Lady.