When the media covers war, every other topic fadesTrump will do anything to distract from the political damage of the Epstein files
The media thrives on war, and always has. Every news organization, for days, has been leading with Trump’s aggressive and impetuous (and illegal) strike on Iran and the killing of its longtime leader. The coverage has blotted out almost everything else. That’s understandable, to some extent. This is a huge story, and the public is hungry for information. But it means that you’re seeing far less about some of the things Trump wants to blot out from existence. Far less about his appearance in the Epstein files. Far less about the corruption of the Justice Department. Far less about his wildly inappropriate role in the future of CNN and his broader effort to control the news industry. (I wrote about this last week in the Guardian). Far less about the Republican plans to disrupt the midterm elections, which are now only eight months away. Far less about Trump’s dismal approval ratings. The subjects that were dominating the news last week are brushed aside. Instead, it’s all war, all the time. On the NBC News website Monday afternoon, as one example, you had to get past 11 Iran-related stories to reach anything else. On Monday’s print New York Times front page, a stunning investigative story about Jeffrey Epstein’s use of “elite” medical doctors to treat his young victims got a small presence at the bottom of the page. On the Times mobile app on Monday, I scrolled and scrolled without finding any mention of Epstein at all — much less any further follow-up to NPR’s scoop by Stephen Fowler last week about allegations that Trump had sexually abused a minor: “Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump.” And even when it comes to the war itself, there’s far too little about the fact that it is illegal, since the strike lacked Congressional approval. For that, you had to turn to columnists like Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer who wrote over the weekend that “a mad king’s illegal war on Iran is a cry for regime change … in Washington.” Bunch wrote, “There’s only one thing that truly matters about Donald Trump’s joint war with Israel against Iran … It is blatantly illegal.” Or to a good piece by former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes in the Times. “This was a decision made by one man with no legal basis, little public support and no coherent explanation of an endgame.” Or to some of the best commentators on Substack, like Robert Reich, who wrote “Anyone who has doubted Trump’s intention to replace American democracy with a dictatorship should now be fully disabused.” The Atlantic’s overall coverage has been stellar, and notably has featured many bylines of reporters who decamped from the Washington Post. You can be sure that this drastic change of subject is all part of Trump’s plan. So as citizens and news consumers, we need to be hyper-aware of what’s missing. Take, for example, the front-page analysis piece in Sunday’s Times by David Sanger, “Trump’s War of Choice, With a Key Question: Why Now?” As he searched over many paragraphs for the “why now?” of the strike, Sanger never touched on how deeply Trump wants to change the subject away from those things that are threatening him. True, Sanger is a national security journalist, not a politics guy, but this struck me as a pretty big hole in the analysis. The other thing that’s missing is much on-the-ground coverage. Iran is notoriously hard to cover from the inside. The Washington Post just dismantled much of its international reporting team. And in general, there are far fewer reporters who even have a chance of covering this war from where it’s actually happening. I was impressed, though, by the Post’s history-rich piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung — two great reporters who remain after the recent deep layoffs: “Trump pursues Iranian decapitation without a plan for what comes next.” On Fox News, for example, some coverage amounted to straight-up warmongering and cheerleading. Mark Levin, on a radio show, called critics of Trump’s strike “pimps for the enemy.” The Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro gushed that Trump is “the most courageous commander in chief,” and a Fox News guest Julian Epstein bizarrely speculated that the strike could bring Trump a Nobel Peace Prize, which is “very, very long overdue.” But the right-wing voices are split, with Tucker Carlson blasting the aggression as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” The one constant is that war is the topic. Everywhere. And no surprise that Trump was calling up prominent national reporters to offer them “exclusive” interviews as he tries to build support for what he has wrought. These include ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Michael Scherer at the Atlantic, Jake Tapper at CNN, and quite a few more. As Mark Jacob noted on Bluesky, “the key to getting mainstream media on board with an illegal war is making them feel like an important part of it.” And Oliver Willis of Daily Kos nailed it: “When he wants to sell a war, suddenly they’re not ‘fake news’ anymore.” It’s hard not to think of the movie “Wag the Dog,” in which a manufactured war was dreamed up to distract from encroaching political disaster. And, on the subject of how news media loves a war, one recalls the (possibly apocryphal) story about newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst who said to a correspondent dispatched to Cuba to report on a war with Spain but who reported that all was quiet. “Please remain. You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” Leave a comment © 2026 Margaret Sullivan |