Republicans learn to ignore misguided media critics

 Joe Squire:

The Republican Party seems to be learning the lesson that Donald Trump began teaching during his time in office.

That lesson is simple: Don’t play by the media’s rules and don’t try to win their approval. It’s not a game you’ll ever win, and Trump managed to have a largely successful presidency (in terms of many of its policies) being unencumbered by the whims of the media as other presidents have been in the past.

For reasons that escape many of us, there are Republican politicians who try to shape their statements, policies, and interviews around what the media wants to talk about or hear about. There are many Republicans who still think that using the press to get their message out, and that access to the media, is important.

But doing so on the media’s terms is never the unbiased situation it’s supposed to be. Journalists have become increasingly hostile to Republicans, joining in Democrats’ talking point of the GOP going all-in on extremism, continuing to push Republicans as supporters of insurrection, etc. There’s no trying to win with the media because they are not an unbiased, objective industry. They are complicit in, and even crafters of, the Democratic narrative nine times out of ten.

Earlier this week, we saw several stories cropping up about Republicans shutting out the media. It started with a piece in New York Magazine on Monday, with a Republican adviser straight-up saying they don’t see the point.

“I just don’t even see what the point is anymore,” said an adviser to one likely GOP presidential aspirant, who requested anonymity to discuss press strategy. “We know reporters always disagreed with the Republican Party, but it used to be you thought you could get a fair shake. Now every reporter, and every outlet, is just chasing resistance rage-clicks.”

The problem with this piece, however, is that the writer proves the adviser’s point in the very next paragraph.

A competing theory of the case is that there is really not much Republicans can say. The past six years have seen them rally behind a person almost all of them once denounced as dangerously unfit for public office — even as their most dire 2015-era warnings proved true. Any decent profile writer would have to ask, until some kind of satisfactory answer was achieved, what they saw during the Trump administration that made them change their stance. In the case of Cruz, what explains the flip from describing Trump as an immoral bully to writing a glowing profile of him for the Time “100” issue? I changed my mind because I wanted to win reelection and become a powerful politician is typically not a satisfactory answer.

The Washington Post and Vanity Fair likewise had lamentations on the GOP shutting out the press on Tuesday....

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The media has earned the distrust of Republicans.  The jobs of the reporters should become harder when they are so biased.