Fascinating Article About Trump and MSM

4/18/25 Politico.  It is both an attack on what it sees as Trump's authoritarian attempts to crush mainstream news media and at times, an acknowledgement that they largely created him as an important public figure starting in the 1980s.  Why?  He made good copy and he understood news media and how to use them.  He comes across as evil genius:

"But as much as he was a user of the media, and the media a user of him, Trump was also a voracious and intuitive student of the same. “Donald Trump,” former Page Six reporter Corynne Steindler once said, “understands the media almost better than the media itself.” The strange ways ideas move. How fantasies and fibs can come to feel like facts. So he had to have felt the tectonic shifts: In the media, and therefore in politics, too, news, information, entertainment, gossip, celebrity — all of it was getting closer to one and the same in a 24-7 ether."

What is interesting also is how this article says that Trump's first term was good for many MSM businesses:

"TV ratings boomed. The Washington Post turned a profit for the first time in years. The New York Times went from less than 2 million digital subscriptions in 2016 to 4 million in 2018 to more than 6 million in 2020. “The Trump presidency was a major force behind the business transformation; his election riveted a divided nation, drawing millions of new subscribers and a surge in revenues,” Adam Nagourney wrote in his book about the Times. “The paradox of Trump’s view of the media only deepened after his election,” Jill Abramson wrote in her book Merchants of Truth. “Courtesy of Trump, they were more threatened than ever, but also more vital.”"