Howard Kurtz, a longtime Fox News contributor and veteran media reporter, warned on Thursday that a phenomenon he calls “Trump Exhaustion Syndrome” is leading the media to overlook President Donald Trump’s most serious controversies. Kurtz, who spent 12 years hosting the popular Fox News media-affairs program Media Buzz until it was cancelled shortly after he confronted Trump about his lies in an interview during the 2024 campaign, argued in a Fox News opinion column that the president is a “master media manipulator” who is grinding down the press’s ability to expose his worst transgressions.

“As I look at a decade of coverage of the man who loves all things gold,” Kurtz wrote, “I have to conclude that many journalists are suffering from Trump Exhaustion Syndrome.” The condition, he asserted, “involves throwing up your hands and abandoning basic fact-checking,” on the theory that “what the hell, everyone knows Trump says lots and lots of things that are untrue.”

Kurtz, who emphasized that he is “not anti-Trump,” attributed much of the problem to the impulse to produce stories that will draw heavy attention on social media. “Why do a second-day story analyzing what the president did or said,” he asked, “when the hot story is Trump praising Nicki Minaj and her beautiful butt?”

According to Kurtz, such clickbait coverage ends up crowding out reporting on the president’s more dangerous behavior, and he cited clear examples. “The other day, the president came out and said he had ordered the Justice Department to intervene in the crazy Alaska election,” he wrote. “It was right there. He didn’t hide it. Pronounced it out in the open. I know the widespread belief that the department was doing his bidding — charging James Comey a third time? For younger readers, there used to be a brick wall between the White House and DOJ. If Joe Biden had breached that wall only once, he would have been impeached, convicted and behind bars. As a former Justice Department reporter, I can tell you that divide hasn’t been pulverized since Watergate, when AG John Mitchell went to prison.” By the following day, Kurtz noted, the press had moved on. For readers needing the history: Comey is the onetime FBI director whom Trump fired in 2017, and Mitchell, who served as President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, was convicted in 1975 for his role in the Watergate cover-up and went on to serve prison time.

“That’s Trump Exhaustion Syndrome in action,” he wrote, explaining that “Trump is a master media manipulator. He has known, since I was in New York writing about his exploits as a combative developer, how to distract the press from an unfavorable story, and he’s acknowledged as much to me.” When Trump declares that “Norway sucks” or rages about not winning the Nobel Prize, which is decided by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo, Kurtz argued, he knows the remarks will make news — as do his comments about the bodies of Nicki Minaj or Republican candidates. “He understands most of the press will take the bait,” Kurtz said, though he conceded that “sometimes Trump just gets carried away at rallies.”

Whatever the case, Trump’s less consequential actions “tend to squeeze out other stories.” According to Kurtz, “When he ordered the raid on Ilhan Omar’s home — abandoning the longstanding justice practice of doing nothing to influence politics in a campaign’s last 60 days — Trump created a major, important news story, no question about it.” Even so, he observed, the press has given less and less attention to the president’s repeated, flimsy attempts to prosecute his political opponents. Omar is a Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, and the custom Kurtz invoked is the Justice Department’s so-called 60-day rule, an unwritten guideline intended to keep federal law enforcement from appearing to influence the outcome of a looming election.

Urging his colleagues in the press not to give in to that impulse, Kurtz concluded: “By convincing themselves there’s no point in challenging him because he constantly lies, many are indeed suffering from Trump Exhaustion Syndrome.”

Source: Alternet