Analysis. The Naked King’s Strategy

The relationship between government and media should never be smooth or friendly. With the fulfillment of its work,“The Fourth State” inconveniences the government. This is the nature of the interaction between both entities and the embodiment of one of the key pillars in open societies.

However, we are witnessing an unprecedented clash between the Media and the Trump administration in the U.S., where its president calls journalists “the most dishonest people in the world”.

How did it ever come to this? U.S. media lives off rating and has transformed its coverage in a mixture of fact and entertainment amidst the age of social media. Apart from doubling its platforms, the media trivialized itself for survival. This is how countless hours of free coverage were given to former Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in a trend that exhibited his abhorrent comments, which captured the attention of followers and critics alike, and guaranteed the captive audience that landed the publicity that pays the payroll.

This was so, until the Republican showed real chances of winning.

Once a Trump presidency became viable at the polls, traditional media raged against it and showed how inadequate a character Trump was to take the first seat of the nation. In the eve of the U.S. election, newspapers like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times envisaged a comfortable victory for Hillary Clinton. Then November 8 came and Trump’s world became our world.

As early as September 2016, a survey by Gallup noted that the media held the lowest levels of social acceptance in history, an average of 32%, with a 14% acceptance from the Republican faction, responsible for electing Trump.

For conservatives, traditional news are fake news. Trump’s art of manipulating media has allowed him to use them at his convenience, while demonizing them when it is to his greater advantage.

White House spokesmen went from an educated Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, in the Obama administration to a rampant rapid-fire, Sean Spicer, in the Trump administration, who, during his first press briefing, scolded the media, without allowing any questions from the press and lied on a trivial matter, which Trump himself brought to the public eye.

A few days later, senior White House adviser, Kellyanne Conway, said that Spice had presented “alternative facts” during her interview at political T.V. show, Meet the Press, to what anchor Chuck Todd replied “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods”.

Since then the world lives in a sort of fictitious reality, which imposes itself as a curse on a daily basis.

The treason to U.S. compassionate values and the defense of human rights are justified amidst the urgency to preserve what this administration considers as “national security”. Insulting and attacking allies is now seen as a skill of a vigorous negotiator, not of an irresponsible imbecile as it used to be.

The president knows of the social distrust against media and thus uses the confrontation with it to undermine, even more, its credibility. White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, with ties to alt-right and white supremacist groups, has called news agencies “the opposition party”.

In my opinion, Trump introduces a trivial topic to impose it on the public opinion for discussion; he then undermines its coverage and uses the media to swamp the agenda with distractions that create opportunities to move its discredit forward.

The plan seems to be that once his government imposes drastic public policies, that go against the U.S. core, there are no authorized voices left with enough strength and credibility to expose them. This is an authoritarian strategy that the naked king imposes day by day so that no one dares to even consider he walks without clothes. These are dangerous times we live in.