Donald Trump is the conservative media

Drake, a rapper, wanted to see his friend, the basketball superstar LeBron James, immediately after the Miami Heat won the 2013 nba Finals. But a security guard refused him entry into the champagne-drenched celebration because he lacked press credentials. “I am media,” the Grammy winner reportedly responded. Three years later, Donald Trump successfully crashed a much bigger party: the Republican National Convention. Mr Trump, a walking media institution, brushed aside early opposition from right-leaning news and opinion outlets and won the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. In the years since, conservative media either have conformed to his vision of politics or tried and failed to persuade Republican voters to abandon it. This dynamic has accelerated as he pursues his party’s nomination for a third time.

For much of American history, the dominant media institutions were partisan or ideological. George Washington even complained of being “buffitted in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers”. But the media oligopolies that dominated much of the 20th century—big television and radio networks and print publications with enormous circulations—claimed to bring Americans balanced, non-partisan, objective reporting. American conservatives were highly sceptical of the arrangement.

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