Abstract
Scholars and political commentators point to Trump’s war on the media since the 2016 election as an unprecedented attack on a vital check to Presidential power. However, little attention has been paid to the role that White audiences play in this critical debate. In this article, I examine the relationship between Trump, the media, and White audiences. Using data taken from the American Trends Panel, I show that affect for Trump is conditional on Whites’ selective partisan exposure to conservative news media. My analysis also shows that exposure to political and election news directly from Trump intensifies the relationship between Whites’ perceptions of media bias and their distrust of national news organizations. The findings provide a novel and unique contribution to the existing scholarship by demonstrating the causal effect of selective exposure to conservative media outlets on affect for Trump.
Highlights
Since his election in 2016, Trump and his network have declared war on the media (Grynbaum, 2017a; Kellam & Stine, 2017)—an institution regarded by many as the “Fourth Estate” of the American political system (Schultz, 1998)
The results provide some evidence in support of the hypothesis that there are heterogenous effects by race in the effect of media consumption on affect for Trump; With the exception of selective exposure to the New York Post, the results indicate that selection exposure to political and election news from a variety of conservative outlets will increase affect for Trump, and that this effect is more salient among the White only sample
Trump is a unique case in the annals of American Presidents when it comes to his relationship with the media
Summary
Since his election in 2016, Trump and his network have declared war on the media (Grynbaum, 2017a; Kellam & Stine, 2017)—an institution regarded by many as the “Fourth Estate” of the American political system (Schultz, 1998). Popular commentary and scholarly research debating the relationship between Trump and the media have tended to focus on the ways in which Trump’s attacks on the news media represent a significant threat to a vital check on Presidential power (Kalb, 2018) Ignored in these critical debates about Trump and the media is the role of an additional contextual variable— Whiteness—and how Trump’s relationship with the media is shaped by the consumption behavior and attitudes of White audiences. Exposure to political and information news from Trump intensifies the relationship between Whites’ perceptions of media bias and their levels of distrust in national news organizations This descriptive finding is important because it further highlights the unique relationship between Trump supporters and media outlets
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