The US media boycott hit Trump right where it hurts. Now it’s Hanson’s turn

September 25, 2026 — 1:30am

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Solidarity? In America? Among the media? It seems astonishing that anything quite so unified could grow from America’s famously polarised soil, but here we are, watching as such sworn enemies as Fox News and MS NOW stand in solidarity with each other, and against President Donald Trump’s latest attack on their craft.

These are the paradigm cases of American media partisanship: Fox News often Trump’s cheer squad, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) a kind of progressive riposte. Each symbolises everything the other hates. And yet this week, that was forgotten when Trump declared he was banning MS NOW, alongside CNN and Politico, from the White House, and deactivated their correspondents’ press passes. Illegally so, it turned out, and a court has just ordered they be reinstated. But in the meantime, Fox – alongside ABC, CBS and NBC – had boycotted Trump’s press conferences.

Suddenly, Trump found himself at risk of greatly reduced television coverage in a week of addressing the UN and hosting Xi Jinping. Already, we’ve seen his team forced to capture their own footage of Trump arriving heroically to open the new White House helipad, the kind of thing that news cameras would have filmed. The feed was nigh unwatchable. There he was, saying words no one could hear, exuding exactly no authority. A Trump-shaped tree, falling in the forest.

That sort of thing is unimaginable for someone like Trump, who loves and dominates television more than any president ever has. He is........

© WA Today