President Donald Trump’s decision to shut down a joint US-Mexico border wall is a setback for the media and the left.
But it’s also a step forward.
The media, particularly Fox News, continues to take the issue seriously.
But as a new study by the American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Navarro and Robert Rector shows, it is a mischaracterization of the facts.
“A number of factors, including Trump’s rhetoric, have driven media coverage of the wall,” Rector and Navarro write in a new article published Monday in the Journal of Politics and Public Policy.
The study finds that the media has reported more about Trump’s wall and less about how it’s being built than the Obama administration did.
In their piece, Rector, R. Clement Stone and Jonathan Martin argue that the wall is not just a barrier but a political construct.
In other words, Trump is pushing for a wall that will divide the country, and he’s making sure the media will cover it.
Trump is not building a wall in the same way that Obama did.
He’s building a political project.
That’s how we see it, the authors write.
“The media is not reporting on the border wall,” they write.
It’s reporting on Trump’s “wall.”
The media is reporting on what’s being constructed.
And the media keeps reporting on it.
It would be difficult for us to find another media story about the border fence that didn’t have the wall as a central topic.
Trump and his allies are building a barrier, not a wall.
He is using his bully pulpit to bully the press, and the media responds.
But the media does not report on the wall’s construction.
The story is not about the wall.
It is about Trump and the wall, which is a project that is not going to succeed.
“When Trump first announced his wall, we wrote about it as a barrier.
And in fact, we said that at the time,” said Peter Navaros, director of the Media Research Center and co-author of the study.
“I don’t think there was much discussion of the fence’s future as a wall, much less that the fence was a bad idea.
And there was a lot of concern about its cost.
But when Trump and others began to talk about the fence, the media started focusing on the fence.”
Navarro, Stone and Rector found that the more the media covered the fence — and the more stories about it were published — the less the media reported on the structure of the border.
The more stories the media published, the less attention the wall received.
The wall was not built as a “border wall,” the authors said.
It was constructed as a political statement.
“It’s not a barrier or a wall,” Stone and Navaras wrote.
“This wall is an effort to create a border, a physical barrier, that is a political wall.”
The wall’s critics have made a similar point.
The press is not the only party that has been covering the wall in terms of the media.
“For a long time, the press has been the only institution with the resources and capacity to take a stand on the issue,” Stone said.
“But there is no wall in our media ecosystem, and it is not clear what the media are doing when they cover it.”
The Trump administration and Trump’s supporters have also been vocal about the importance of the press.
In May, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the press had a “responsibility” to report on “the substance” of the negotiations that led to the wall — which was something that was not happening during Obama’s tenure.
And Trump’s top strategist Stephen Bannon told a New York Times reporter that the White House was trying to “control the press.”
Trump has also criticized the media for covering the “birther” movement, which was a movement in the 2000s that claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Trump, Bannon and others have called the media “the enemy of the American people.”
They have said that the press “talks the game” and that its coverage of Trump has been biased against him.
Navarro agreed.
“Media coverage of President Trump is generally biased,” he wrote.
The only time it’s not biased is when the media ignores the administration’s claims about the threat posed by undocumented immigrants, Navarro said.
The Trump White House, though, has been far more transparent about its plan for building the wall than the administration of previous administrations.
The administration said the wall would cost $10 billion and that construction would begin in 2019.
And last week, the president’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, said the administration was not planning to build a wall but would instead build a fence along the border and a “physical wall” to deter immigrants from entering the United State.
That fence will be built “in a way that is much more resistant to the elements of nature that