The GOP has handed us the tactic to bring down Trump

Source: Raw Story · Bias: Far Left

Summary

Standing in the Oval Office last week, 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.

Related Coverage

Daily Analysis

Read the full Parallax Pulse for March 30, 2026 — an AI-powered analysis of how Left and Right media covered the biggest stories this day.

More Headlines From March 30, 2026

arallaxNews.io
The GOP has handed us the tactic to bring down Trump
Raw Story

The GOP has handed us the tactic to bring down Trump

Far Left

Standing in the Oval Office last week, 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.

Read Full Story at Source