Media The foreign media that dare not speak ill of Trump Even countries angry at the U.S. avoid insulting the volatile president.

When a tell-all book infuriated President Donald Trump last winter, an Arab leader saw a chance to undermine a regional rival through the language Trump understands best: media coverage.

In January, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi sought to ensure that Trump saw the coverage that Michael Wolff’s explosive book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” was earning in the state media outlet of his country’s bitter rival, Qatar, according to emails reviewed by POLITICO.


In the emails, George Nader, an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, urged a Republican fundraiser ahead of a planned meeting with Trump to inform the president that the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera was covering Wolff’s book “big time” and casting Trump as “totally incompetent and out of control.”

The fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, then the Republican National Committee deputy finance chair, never did raise the issue with Trump, according to people familiar with their interactions. But the previously unreported request reflects a widespread belief among foreign rulers that a president who fulminates at domestic outlets he calls “fake news” might also be stirred to action against nations whose media organs insult him.

For regimes with state-controlled media, this presents a propagandist's dilemma: How to cover a U.S. president who bases his foreign policy in part on how much personal respect other nations pay him?

So far, the answer is: gingerly.

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Several autocratic regimes with which the U.S. has tense relations — including China, Turkey, North Korea and Russia — have avoided the Al Jazeera route, directing their state-controlled outlets not to criticize Trump by name, according to former government officials and regional experts. Instead, these state-controlled outlets find scapegoats other than Trump himself, including his advisers, the “Deep State” and former President Barack Obama. Or they simply avoid mentioning the president at all, instead complaining about U.S. policy in the abstract.

This posture — a departure from how those same outlets covered Obama — represents an understanding that nothing sets off the president like a challenge to his ego, and that one nasty headline dropped on his desk could have real policy implications.

Some governments might also want to avoid demonizing Trump for domestic political reasons, to ensure public support in case they try to strike a grand bargain with the president.

In July, for instance, the Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported that officials in Beijing had ordered state media outlets to soften personal criticism of Trump to avoid antagonizing him and exacerbating tensions with the United States over trade. “The message is not to antagonise Trump personally, but [to] keep the affair in the realm of state policy,” one expert in Chinese foreign policy told the paper. (POLITICO has a content-sharing partnership with the South China Morning Post.)

On the eve of August trade talks between the countries, the state-run China Global Television Network posted a satirical web video sarcastically thanking Trump for starting a trade war. It was pulled within hours.

The muted tenor of official state organs stands in stark contrast to the tone on Chinese social media, said Yishu Mao, a researcher at Berlin’s Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies who is preparing to release results of a study of social media discussion of the trade war. “Trump is criticized very harshly as an unwise leader by Chinese netizens,” she said.

But after watching the president in action, the government of President Xi Jinping has concluded, according to Matt Schrader, editor of China Brief for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, that “If you can get Trump in a room without him being angry at you in the first place because of what your media is doing, then there’s a decent chance you can get out of the room with what you want.”

Last month, after Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech spelling out a confrontational policy toward China that reportedly spurred leaders in Beijing to prepare for a “new cold war” with the U.S., Chinese state media mocked the remarks.

But the Chinese response was more notable for what was missing: Trump’s name. A commentary in the state-run Xinhua news service, for instance, made five references to “Washington” and cited Pence by name, but never mentioned the president himself.

According to Schrader, the volume and the tone of the media response paled in comparison to the private anger expressed by Chinese officials.

A similar posture can be found in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cronies control the vast majority of outlets following a brutal yearslong crackdown on independent media.

In Turkey, a shift began even before Trump’s election, with a failed July 2016 coup that many Turks believe the U.S. backed. The pro-Erdogan Güneş newspaper splashed Obama’s face across its front page , fingering him as the “number one” suspect.

If that weren’t enough, the day before the election, the paper ran a column accusing Hillary Clinton of masterminding several murders.

Since Trump has assumed office, in the face of diplomatic flaps and aggressive moves by his administration, Turkish media have continued to avoid demonizing him.

"Trump has actually taken more forceful action than the Obama administration did. But the Turkish media hasn’t called him out on it, because Erdogan still thinks his personal relationship with Trump can turn the tide,” said Merve Tahiroglu, a Turkey analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Given how reckless these newspapers have been in their attacks against Clinton and Obama, the Erdogan media's prudence towards Trump is clearly calculated.”

After a diplomatic spat last fall over the arrest of a Turkish worker for the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, the newspaper Sabah blamed the row on the U.S. ambassador to Ankara, John Bass , a soon-to-depart career diplomat.

And when Trump imposed sanctions on Turkey in August in order to secure the release of an imprisoned American pastor, Andrew Brunson, Turkish media downplayed the confrontation. The story made few Turkish front pages, and coverage tended to attribute the sanctions to the “United States” rather than to Trump, according to Tahiroglu.

Meanwhile, a column in the Erdogan-aligned outlet Yeni Akit sought to explain the sanctions by claiming Trump was constrained by “secret zionist power structures” that had forced his hand.

The dynamic can work the other way in countries seeking Trump’s embrace: After Trump visited Saudi Arabia last year, the state-controlled newspaper Arab News ran an editorial declaring, “Two Thumbs Up, Mr. Trump.”

In North Korea, whose media are the world’s most tightly controlled, Trump was initially a target of insults. (The media are overseen by Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong, vice director of the ruling party’s Propaganda and Agitation Department.) Amid escalating insults between Washington and Pyongyang in September 2017, Kim Jong Un declared Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”

But since June’s nuclear summit between the two leaders, North Korean media have dropped such talk entirely. Even in subsequent moments of tension, the country’s bombastic state media have focused their ire on two of the president’s hawkish aides, national security adviser John Bolton (“we do not hide our feeling of repugnance toward him”) and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom it accused after a July meeting of making “gangster-like” demands.

"They have worked very hard to separate President Trump and his advisers,” said David Maxwell, a retired army colonel and North Korea specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “And one of the reasons for that is they think they can deal with President Trump."

Nowhere has state media’s strategic patience toward Trump been tried more than in Russia, which, along with other autocratic regimes, has invested heavily in slick propaganda organs in recent years, and where citizen-viewers were led to believe his election would bring detente with the United States.

"They are still making excuses for Trump, and they say he would most likely have lifted the sanctions before now — but his hands are tied by Congress and the so-called deep state,” said Julia Davis, an independent analyst who monitors Russian media. By doing so, these outlets are "buying [President Vladimir] Putin more time by telling people 'Just wait, he will still come through for us,' instead of just admitting Russia has taken a series of disastrous steps, mainly in Ukraine, that led to the sanctions," she said.

When the Kremlin-funded news outlet RT referred in September to Trump’s policy in Syria, where Washington and Moscow have chafed, its headline did not lay the blame at the president’s feet. Instead, it declared, “Deep State has full control.”

