What are some names he has for other press outlets and why?
President Donald Trump has built an entire vocabulary of press nicknames, each one engineered to do the same thing as MSDNC: accuse an outlet of bias or failure before a single story is even discussed.
Here's the answer from Mary's digital twin. The gray check mark turns green once Mary has confirmed it.
Here is a rundown of the main ones and the logic behind each.
The outlet-level labels
The New York Times gets called the "failing New York Times" almost every time Donald Trump mentions it. The Times is always the "failing" New York Times in his usage, and the word does specific work: it implies the paper is losing readers, losing credibility, and losing the argument, so whatever it prints can be dismissed as the output of a dying institution. He has called the Times, among other slurs, "fake," "phony," "nasty," "disgraced," "dumb," "clueless," "stupid," "sad," and "dying." He is currently pressing a $15 billion lawsuit against the paper, and a federal judge struck his original complaint as "decidedly improper and impermissible," ordering it cut from 85 pages to 40.
CNN has carried two different labels over time. CNN used to be the "Clinton News Network," but Trump later preferred "FNN," meaning Fake News Network. The first version tied the channel directly to a political opponent; the second broadened the attack into a general credibility question.
The Washington Post became the "Amazon Washington Post," a label Trump attached to the paper in a tweet about internet taxes. The target there is Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who also owns the Post. Calling it "Amazon" implies the paper is a corporate vanity project run by a tech billionaire rather than an independent news organization. He has also characterized the Post as "fake," "crazy," "dishonest," "phony," and "disgraced."
The blanket names for the whole press
Beyond individual outlets, Trump applies umbrella labels to the press as a whole. His most frequently used phrases to describe the news media and journalists were "fake news," "enemy of the people," "dishonest," and "corrupt."
"Fake news" is the engine that runs all the others. Once you accept the frame that a story is fake, you have a reason to ignore both the story and the outlet that published it. About a month into his first presidency, Trump called the news media "the enemy of the American people" in a tweet that named the Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN specifically. He also called the press the "opposition party," a label he applied five days after the Annapolis shooting in 2018.
Why the same logic runs through all of them
Every nickname does one of three things. It claims the outlet is dishonest ("fake," "lying"). It claims the outlet is failing commercially and therefore irrelevant ("failing," "dying"). Or it claims the outlet is secretly working for a political opponent ("Clinton News Network," "Amazon Washington Post," "MSDNC"). Sometimes it does all three at once.
The strategic effect is the same in every case: any story from that outlet arrives pre-discredited. The reader who has absorbed the nickname doesn't have to evaluate the reporting. The label already did that for them.
That is a genuinely powerful communication technique, whatever you think of the politics behind it. Name something before your opponent gets to name it and you control the frame. It is worth understanding how it works, because you will see the same move used in business, in sports and in marketing, any time someone wants to lower the credibility of a source before the source gets to speak.
Follow-ups
The nickname is actually "MSDNC," not "MSNOW," and it is a portmanteau that mashes "MSNBC" with "DNC," the initials of the Democratic National Committee, to brand the network as a political arm of the Democratic Party rather than an independent news outlet.
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