(PresidentialHill.com)- Chris Wallace has criticized journalists who turned into “antagonists on the field” against the late President Donald Trump.
Wallace appeared as a guest on the Thursday episode of The Axe Files with David Axelrod as the host. The chat primarily focused on Wallace’s professional life. But inevitably, the subject of the 45th president’s interactions with the media came up.
Axelrod asked Wallace to comment on how Trump’s presidency had changed the media and journalism scene.
Axelrod said Trump had a well-thought-out scheme to portray the media as partisan participants, which has repercussions for journalism. Therefore, whenever someone reveals facts that Trump considers unfavorable, he fits them into that paradigm. That appears to have hurt the news media’s coverage of politics in various areas.
Wallace cited an infamous Trump tweet that, in his opinion, set the tone for the former president’s chilly interactions with the media.
He said Trump sent out the first tweet that said ABC, NBC, the Times, and the Post are not just his adversary, they’re the enemy of the state.
Wallace said he believes this was in February 2017, or barely a month after he took office. He said it is incredibly terrifying terminology reminiscent of Stalin.
According to Wallace, this kind of language undermined the audience’s confidence in the profession and affected some of his peers’ strategies.
Wallace said the statement implies that they’re not Trump’s enemy but the public’s enemy. They are America’s adversaries. That significantly affects how well-liked and credible the media is.
According to Wallace, it “pushed some of our colleagues over the edge, which I think people pushed back in a terrible way.”
He tricked them into fighting on the field when that wasn’t what we should have been doing. I made an effort to, “You know, not play into it, you know, maintain our position,” he continued.
“We’re not for Trump. We’re not against Trump. We’re just gonna, you know, play it straight and cover the news. But I think that some people fell into a kind of a trap he set in becoming, antagonistic oppositional, and to a certain degree, I think kind of fulfilled that tweet that he sent,” he explained.
