The Presidents vs. the Press: The Countless Battle between the White Home and the Media–from the Founding Fathers to Faux Information

“The FAKE NEWS media,” Donald Trump has tweeted, “isn’t my enemy, it’s the enemy of the American Individuals!” Has our free press ever confronted as nice a risk? Maybe not—however the stress between presidents and journalists is as outdated because the republic itself.

 

Each president has been satisfied of his personal honesty and transparency; each reporter who has coated the White Home beat has believed with equal fervency that his or her journalistic rigor protects the nation from hazard. Our first president, George Washington, was additionally the primary to grumble about his therapy within the newspapers, though he saved his complaints non-public. Subsequent chiefs like John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Barack Obama weren’t so reticent, going as far as to wield govt energy to overturn press freedoms, and even to prosecute journalists.

 

Theodore Roosevelt was the primary president to actively handle the secure of reporters who adopted him, doling out data, steering protection, and squashing tales that interfered along with his agenda. It was a technique that galvanized TR’s public assist, however the lesson was misplaced on Woodrow Wilson, who by no means accepted reporters into his inside circle. Franklin Roosevelt remodeled media relations perpetually, holding greater than a thousand presidential press conferences and harnessing the brand new energy of radio, at instances bypassing the press altogether. John F. Kennedy excelled on tv and charmed reporters to cover his private life, whereas Richard Nixon was the primary to forged the press as a public enemy. From the times of newsprint and pamphlets to the rise of Fb and Twitter, every president has harnessed the media, whether or not intentional or not, to imprint his personal character on the workplace.

 

On this outstanding new historical past, acclaimed scholar Harold Holzer examines the twin rise of the American presidency and the media that formed it. From Washington to Trump, he chronicles the disputes and mistrust between these core establishments that outline america of America, revealing that the essence of their confrontation is constructed into the material of the nation.