'Media Bias/Media Offenders': Trump's media blacklist on White House website

Immediately after the merger was approved, the new ownership redesigned the editorial line of CBS News. Bari Weiss, a journalist and podcaster who became famous for her criticism of the 'progressive woke' and more conservative views on Israel, university campuses and digital culture, was appointed editor-in-chief. Under her leadership, the newsroom was restructured: away with several programmes and projects on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and climate, into new formats closer to the language of podcasts and opinionism, cuts to correspondents from sensitive areas such as Gaza and the downsizing of some figures linked to social movements. CBS seemed on the way to a repositioning that should have reassured the White House. Yet, the network still ended up in the top 3 of 'offender' media. Because there are no structural allies: all it takes is one week of bad headlines or a story that irritates the president to be hung on the wall.

Trump and his spokesmen present the initiative asa simple response to 'systemic bias' in the press. They cite Gallup polls certifying trust in the mainstream media at an all-time low and Media Research Center studies showing that, in the first months of 2025, coverage of the president on the major generalist networks was negative more than 90% of the time. In this narrative, the Media Bias page would be a form of self-defence: if the press strikes, the White House has the right to react, document and counter-argue.

The fears of associations such as the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation revolve around the imbalance: it is one thing to have a tough, even aggressive confrontation between political leaders and the media; it is another to build a blacklist curated by the executive. The biggest risk is not that the Washington Post, CBS or the New York Times will stop criticising Trump, since they have economic means and legal tools to defend themselves. The real danger is the effect on those who are most vulnerable (local reporters, freelancers, small newspapers) who see a colleague end up in the Hall of Shame and 'learn a lesson'. It is the so-called 'chilling effect': there is no need to censor, it is enough to make it clear that the attention of power can become personal. An implicit threat that is added to the explicit one of personal insults - from 'stupid person' to 'Quiet, piggy' - thrown in front of the cameras.

Then there is the way the site plugs into the broader machinery of Trump's political communication. The Media Bias page tabs don't stay locked away in a corner of whitehouse.gov, they get revived on X, on Truth Social, on fundraising mailing lists and on podcasts by commentators close to the White House. They become the reading grid for entire political communities, fuelling micro-campaigns targeted against individual journalists, used to support boycotts, pressure on advertisers and coordinated protests.

The very selection of the 'culprits' reveals the political logic behind the tool. In the Hall of Shame appear newspapers traditionally hostile to Trump, such as the Washington Post - for years in the crosshairs for its tight fact-checking on the president's statements - and MSNBC, accused of 'hysteria' over his economic agenda and, in particular, over the $500 billion plan for the national artificial intelligence infrastructure, the Stargate project. But there is no shortage of theoretically 'closer' media: some sections of the Wall Street Journal, for instance, guilty of delving into Trump's ties with Jeffrey Epstein, crop up on the fringes of the rankings; others are spared. The absence of figures who are also the subject of furious attacks on social media, such as ABC host Jimmy Kimmel, suggests that the choices are not merely reactive but calibrated. In other words, hit where it suits, spare where a communication channel is still needed or where confrontation might cost too much in economic and regulatory terms.

Finally, the historical plan. In the first term, the first cracks in the Trump-media relationship were seen, including withdrawal of accreditation, exclusions from briefings, attempts to discriminate between 'serious media' and 'fake news' by granting privileged access to conservative channels. Today, however, the White House does not just decide who goes into the press room, but compiles a public dossier on the 'bad guys' to be pointed out to public opinion. It is a use of communicative power that not only speaks to a base already convinced that the media are part of a hostile 'deep state', but also risks dragging institutions and citizens into a spiral in which the truth is no longer the result of a comparison between different sources, but the product of an official page that distributes 'scarlet letters'.