Bruce Bartlett

Opinion contributor

Republican distrust of the mainstream news media has long and deep roots. At least since Vice President Spiro Agnew’s famous speech attacking it for liberal bias in 1969 — about the time Roger Ailes was plotting the creation of Fox News — Republicans have viewed journalists as their institutional enemies and everything they report about Republicans as dubious at best and outright lies at worst.

This attitude has served GOP politicians well, especially President Trump, who regularly uses the news media as a punching bag to deflect criticism of things he says and does. At least as far as the Republican base is concerned, it always works.

Even among the GOP intelligentsia, there is a deep-seated skepticism of anything appearing in mainstream news sources. When I was employed by a conservative think tank 13 years ago, I recall going to a reception with some conservative friends after I had made some impolitic remarks quoted in The New York Times.

Curious as to why my friends weren’t ribbing me, I began asking them about the article. Every single one gave me the same answer: Not only did they not read the left-wing Times, but how dare I suggest that they did? It was an insult.

Honestly, this was my first exposure to what is sometimes called “epistemic closure” — the tendency of those on the right to live in a bubble where they refuse to believe anything that doesn’t come to them through conservative media, such as Drudge Report, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and so on. The ouster and now the death of Ailes, the Fox News founder and CEO, coincides with a rethinking at Fox about how to proceed in the Trump era. But conservative media institutions are so numerous and entrenched that even if Fox changes course, conservatives will still find it easy to avoid mainstream outlets.

In an academic study, I once called this “self-brainwashing.” But it has only gotten worse under Trump. The proof is that his support among Republicans remains rock solid despite a long and growing list of debacles, including the firing of FBI Director James Comey because he was looking too closely into connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and the apparent disclosure by Trump of classified information to the Russian ambassador.

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It’s not that mainstream media outlets never get things wrong. They do. Yet even after Trump admitted in a televised interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt that he did indeed fire Comey to stop the Russia investigation — contrary to his earlier claim that it was because of Comey’s botched investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails — most Republicans still refuse to believe that Russia had anything to do with Comey’s dismissal!

Apparently, we have reached the point where Republicans so distrust the mainstream media, they won’t even believe their own eyes and ears when Trump himself admits publicly that he lied to them — if it appears in a non-conservative news source.

This attitude was again on display when it was revealed that Trump might have disclosed classified information to the Russian ambassador. At first, the White House denied it, said it was a lie. But within hours, Trump himself essentially admitted that it was true in a series of early morning tweets. Yet judging by the reaction of the conservative media, the real scandal here is who leaked the original story, not how could Trump have done such a thing.

Those conservatives willing to accept that Trump did what he did maintain that the president had a perfect legal right to disclose whatever classified information he felt like disclosing. Their position is: No broken laws here, move along, nothing to see.

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As the parallels to Watergate pile up, it is interesting to speculate about how President Nixon would have fared if the GOP were as insular and polarized as it is today and he had a powerful conservative media establishment protecting him.

I think Nixon would have finished his term. He never would have had Republicans such as Sen. Howard Baker turn against him. They would have been too terrified of being pilloried on Fox News and talk radio, and losing the next Republican primary. If Watergate looked like a purely partisan Democratic witch hunt, I think it would have petered out before it got very far — an argument Nixon could much more easily have made with a huge conservative media echo chamber, as Trump has.

The greatest danger to Trump is if Republicans perceive that Trump is endangering their own re-elections in 2018. But at present, they are still more fearful of a conservative primary challenger than a Democrat in the general election. The conservative echo chamber sees to that.

Bruce Bartlett has worked for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. He is the author ofThe Truth Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks, forthcoming in October. Follow him on Twitter: @BruceBartlett

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