Sheffield Press calls Trump inept amid clashes with journalists

The Sheffield Press is treating Donald Trump’s clashes with journalists as a political liability, not just a personality feud, because his attacks on reporters can distort coverage, energize allies and leave opponents reacting on his terms.

That concern has been building for years. On March 19, 2020, Jay Rosen wrote that journalism had to move into an “emergency setting” so it would not “misinform you through us.” The Committee to Protect Journalists followed with a report on April 16, 2020, on the Trump administration and the media, a sign of how often Trump’s rhetoric turned press coverage itself into the story.

Trump’s influence still lands hardest in places already primed for nationalist politics. A Pulitzer Center story based on a November 10, 2018 Boston Globe article described Trump as a “Role Model” for some UK nationalists, showing how his image traveled well beyond the United States. BBC News’ coverage of Trump’s June 2019 UK state visit noted that U.S. media focused heavily on the first day’s pomp and pageantry even as they weighed his politics and rhetoric, another example of how Trump can dominate the frame before anyone else gets to set it.

The same brand that can mobilize supporters can also boomerang on allies. In an October 24, 2023 ABC News story about his feud with Ron DeSantis, Trump used the phrase “kiss of death” as a campaign taunt. The phrase has become shorthand for the risk around Trump’s backing: it can signal attention and energy, but it can also tie a candidate to a polarizing figure whose approval may repel the voters needed to win a broader race.

That tension matters in Sheffield, where the city’s newspaper tradition reaches back to The Sheffield Register, first published by Joseph Gales on June 9, 1787. Sheffield City Council describes newspapers as “the personal diary of a town” and breaks the city’s press history into three periods, before 1840, 1840-1900 and 1900 onward. In a place with that kind of local memory, Trump’s clash with journalists reads less like distant spectacle than a test of how national political noise bends local news judgment.