BuzzFeed is hiring a reporter whose full-time job will be to cover President Donald Trump's complex dynamic with the news. | Getty BuzzFeed hires reporter to cover Trump's relationship with the media

President Donald Trump's complicated relationship with the news media has riveted the political class for months — his impromptu TV appearances where foreign policy is made, his early-morning tweets, his crowing about ratings, and his love-hate relationship with individual outlets.

Now, BuzzFeed, an outlet he recently labeled a "failing pile of garbage," is hiring a reporter whose full-time job will be to cover his complex dynamic with the news. Steven Perlberg, who will join the website from The Wall Street Journal, is part of a broader trend from media outlets to increase their coverage of the Trump administration and its testy relationship with the media. But while plenty of outlets (POLITICO included) have full-time media reporters who often cover Trump, BuzzFeed thus far seems to stand alone as an outlet who is dedicating a full-time person to the intersection.


"We tried to look at the landscape to see what we could add," Katherine Miller, a top editor at BuzzFeed, said. "Over the last three months, there has been a very intense conversation about politics and media and how coverage is being done."

What makes Trump such a compelling media story is that he is obsessed with Twitter and often watches hours of television, commenting live on Twitter on what he sees on TV and sometimes making policy and political decisions based on TV coverage. As he watched a Fox News segment on Tuesday night about killings in Chicago, he threatened to "send the feds in!"

He spent the first four days of his presidency in a raging war with the news media over crowd sizes and false claims of fraudulent voting, jarring his critics, supporters and aides. He has told political allies that the news media is his best foil because his supporters don't trust mainstream outlets. Yet, he chats with network executives behind the scenes, trying to shape his coverage, and he obsesses over ratings.

In the middle of high-level meetings he’ll take phone calls from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, on whose show he recently surprised the world by declaring "let it be an arms race," while Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski sat in their pajamas on a Christmas-themed set, digesting his nuclear rhetoric.

Yet he also deeply cares about The New York Times, calling the paper "a great, great American jewel" hours after calling it "failing." He has forced other world leaders to come to him, yet made rare departures from Trump Tower to visit the Times and Hearst during the transition.

"It’s not just media reporters and media critics are making Trump front and center, it’s that Trump is making the media front and center," said David Folkenflik, the NPR media correspondent. "There has not been much of a transformation in Trump’s impulse at least not discernibly toward the media as he has become president and moved on from being a candidate."

Additionally, his White House has already begun shuffling the media power landscape. They weighed moving reporters from the traditional briefing room in the West Wing and have shuffled the traditional pecking order — taking questions from Lifezette.com and The New York Post to begin news briefings, whereas the Associated Press has traditionally gotten the first crack. His chief strategist came from Breitbart News, a right-wing, nationalist website. Two of their staffers are expected to join the White House, with possibly more coming.

Trump has fueled a growing distrust of the mainstream media, with polls showing historically low trust in traditional news outlets. BuzzFeed itself became something of a media story earlier this month, when it drew criticism and some praise for publishing an unverified dossier of allegations about Trump and his Russian ties. After the document was published, other outlets and Trump's team criticized BuzzFeed, and Trump promised ramifications against the outlet.

"A central strategy of this White House seems to be designed to delegitimize journalism in the eyes of the American people. That makes media reporting — the reporting on how news is produced and consumed — more important than ever," said Gabriel Sherman, the New York magazine reporter. “Given that we're only halfway through Trump's first week and he's already praised Fox News, tweeted a policy idea he seems to have gotten from watching Bill O'Reilly, and baselessly claimed 3-5 million people voted illegally, I'd say yes — Trump will be a big focus of my time."

These days, the White House briefing room has never been more packed. Trump always seems to be on every TV. CNN is hiring a reporter to only cover "fake news," and their weekly show, Reliable Sources, frequently focuses on Trump. The New York Times sent a reporter from New York to spend the week in Washington profiling Sean Spicer, the combative press secretary after he made angry, false claims Saturday.

Miller said the BuzzFeed envisioned the beat broadly. Ideal stories would include Trump's relationship with Google and Twitter, what compromises media outlets are willing to make with Trump, "the revival of the TV news business," and the rise of powerful right-wing outlets. The site wants to break news on how Trump consumes media and what actions his team is willing to take to secure favorable coverage.

"This is not an administration that is going to be particularly interested in the norms of how things are done," Miller said.