Howard Kurtz says media hate for Trump is unprecedented

Fox News host Howard Kurtz, who this year published “Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over Words,” told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson that he wrote his book to take Americans “behind the scenes of [the] trench warfare” between the White House and the media.

“We all seem to be drowning in polarization whether it’s in news coverage, whether it’s on social media, or watching these entertainment shows,” he said.

According to Kurtz, the media’s hatred of Trump is unprecedented. The daily attacks by the media, Kurtz said, are “more personal” and “visceral” than the criticisms of Presidents Obama, Bush, or any other former commanders-in-chief had been.

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“None of us have ever seen anything like this, just the sheer intensity of it,” said Kurtz, who first began interviewing Trump in the late 1980s.

The journalists skew the narrative, according to Kurtz, giving people the impression that Trump is far less successful than he actually is.

“If you only consumed a lot of the mainstream media, particularly places like MSNBC, you would think that the Trump presidency is an absolute disaster, that he’s ruining the entire world … that he’s corrupt, that he’s probably going to be impeached,” Kurtz said.

However, he said, the media is not entirely to blame; Trump’s outlandish behavior often comes back to hurt him. The president can make a speech to Congress that is well-received,  Kurtz said, but then ruin everything by writing a crude tweet that childishly makes fun of his opponents.

“It’s hard to get any fair coverage of this president, and at the same time, I think he goes too far when he says things like, ‘The media are the enemy of the American people,'” Kurtz said.

The “journalists who can’t stand the guy,” the leaks by Trump’s advisors — Kurtz called it the “leakiest White House I ever covered” — and the contribution of the entertainment world together form the perfect storm of vicious attacks on the presidency. These attacks do not stop at Trump, Kurtz noted, but extend to his family members, especially wife Melania and daughter Ivanka, and especially to his voters.

“As a journalist, there are times I’m just embarrassed for the profession,” he said.

At the end of the day, however, Kurtz believes that all of the media’s hatred toward Trump actually helps the president hold on to his Republican base because it inspires an intense “backlash … against the media’s determination to bring him down.”

“It actually helps him with his base,” Kurtz said. “For all of the incredibly negative personal coverage of this president, 90 percent of Republicans support the guy.”