It's no secret that many in the mainstream/traditional news media do not like President Trump, and the President has made that feeling mutual, referring to them as "dishonest," "fake news," and those who peddle fake news as "the enemy of the people." But now it seems the public, specifically Trump supporters, are getting caught up in this ongoing battle. After last week's Trump rally in Florida, a Politico writer named Marc Caputo referred to the crowd as "garbage people" without a "full set of teeth" on Twitter, later deleting the tweets and issuing an apology.
Scott Whitlock, assistant editor at Newsbusters, says Caputo's comments are part of the mindset of many in the mainstream journalism community. "They seem to think that a lot of Trump supporters are stupid, ignorant or rednecks," he tells KTRH. "And they wonder why there is a lot of anti-media sentiment among Trump supporters, well it's because of reasons like that...(Trump supporters) know that a lot of journalists don't like them, so they don't like them back."
The most notable media dust-up from that Trump rally was CNN's Jim Acosta being loudly booed and receiving chants of "CNN sucks" from the crowd as he did his live shot for the network. Acosta later complained he feared for his safety and said, "Americans should not be treating their fellow Americans in this way." Many fellow journalists also jumped to Acosta's defense, comparing the boos and chants to threats of physical violence.
Whitlock believes Acosta and his defenders are being overly dramatic. "He was booed, and I think to extrapolate from that that Trump or Trump supporters want anyone hurt is absurd, it's quite a leap," he says. In particular, Whitlock points out there was no mainstream media outcry about a recent story of an art gallery in Oregon displaying a painting of President Trump getting his throat slashed. "So this kind of hyperventilating we see from the media about Jim Acosta getting booed is over the top and it's also hypocritical, given how they don't seem to care when there are renderings of violence against the President,” says Whitlock.