What Trump Taught Me About the Limits of Legacy Media

The rules of the game favor the powerful and create an inherent bias

In a crowded newsroom high above New York’s Times Square, a hush fell as I greeted Donald Trump on the phone. While my colleagues were used to speaking with high-ranking officials and business leaders, we didn’t often get calls from celebrities.

It was 2007, long before Trump’s political ambitions surfaced, and I learned a valuable lesson that day about the limits of legacy journalism, and my own role in it.

To thrive as a journalist or a media organization, you need access. It delivers scoops and exclusives, granting newsmakers influence in the process. That’s as much about the rules of journalism as it is a business decision. Private outlets are motivated by profit and that’s achieved by attracting eyeballs with those scoops and exclusives that are facilitated by newsmakers.

With the media an integral part of the system it’s supposed to watch over, institutional bias is built in.

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

The game is the system

The call with Trump came as his run on “The Apprentice” — the reality TV series that made him a household name — was showing its age. Ratings were falling and there were rumors it might be canceled. On top of that, the Trump-branded casinos in Atlantic City were again in trouble and losing money.

Despite these wobbles, his name was everywhere, slapped on products from steaks and menswear to cologne and water. There was also Trump vodka with the tagline “Success, distilled,” even though The Donald is well-known for abstaining from alcohol.

The overall impression was that the Trump brand and its claims of representing glamour and success were wearing thin. So I decided to write a story about it.

Photo by Mason Hassoun on Unsplash

After doing research and speaking with branding experts, I did what journalists are supposed to do and reached out to the principals involved: namely, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization.

After weeks of being strung along, my editor told me to tell them that we’d publish the story that afternoon with or without a comment. And so I did. A short time later, I had Mr. Trump on the phone.

The interview went as one might expect. He told me the brand had never been stronger. Everything was great and anyone saying otherwise didn’t know what they were talking about. In short, there was a lot of bombast that was difficult, if not impossible, to verify.

I knew I was being played, but the rules are the rules. We dutifully included his perspective, watering down the story in the process (clearly the point of his call). I chose to go along with it, and that’s exactly the point. The system sustains itself by safe choices and well-intentioned compromises.

The system is the game

Under the old rules of journalism, newsmakers provided facts and information, and the media made its best effort to report the truth. It was a code that served well enough, until the internet broke it.

In the digital age, media businesses need to chase the audience. At the time of my phone interview with Trump, Fox News had already emerged as a force by giving millions a view of the world they wanted to see. That strategy has since been copied across the spectrum.

In private-sector media, the shift was dictated by market realities that demanded a steady supply of content to ensure people keep coming back so that its product generates income (no audience=no revenue). That means maintaining close proximity to power, which reinforces the power of the powerful.

It’s a dynamic that results in system-friendly output, framing crises as deviations from the “normal” order. That is a bias, especially at a time when the system itself is no longer functioning.

No one’s steering that. Having been inside the chaos of newsrooms for decades, that would be impossible. It’s simply media businesses following the code established by the political and economic system we have.

A reboot has started

So if you’re frustrated with legacy media, you’re actually frustrated with a system that puts profits ahead of public interest. That’s the moral imperative that matters under capitalism. That’s probably why you’re reading this (which is much appreciated).

A new era of media disruption is now evolving. Subscriber-supported outlets like here on Substack are far from perfect (many deepen polarization rather than foster solidarity), but they do show that a devolved system that puts people first can take shape.

Thriving independent media is essential for a functioning democracy. Certain kinds of journalism — maintaining a network of bureaus for on-the-ground, in-depth reporting — need scale, which no single writer can replicate.

There could be a better model to what we have now. Nonprofit trusts that are cooperatively funded and governed by the communities they serve (with guardrails to prevent undue influence) could be a model for the future and help re-establish faith in facts.

As for my story on the Trump brand, it has since disappeared from the public record (or at least my best efforts to find it were unsuccessful). That’s just as well.

Trump and his brand have since proven far more durable than anyone would have predicted at the time. What mattered was that a subject with enough leverage has the power to shape his own narrative, regardless of whether the reporting held up.

I hope what I write here will prove more durable.