Uri Berliner, a former editor for NPR, essentially raised the same allegations in a recent online column, concluding that NPR’s coverage is swayed by the personal identities and characteristics of its journalists. In essence, according to Berliner, NPR may distort reality, though in a more subtle way than Trump, by virtue of the journalists it hires, the sources who are quoted by the journalists and the stories the editors decide to cover, to the disadvantage of Trump.

Trump seems to be responding to what he perceives as the media, including NPR and The Washington Post, calling him names, such as “authoritarian,” including by characterizing his speech as action.

As a candidate and as a criminal defendant, Trump can point to verifiable facts that signal possible unfairness. For instance, he’s being tried by a jury selected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans 9 to 1. And the piece about NPR said 87 NPR editors are registered members of the Democratic party and none are Republicans – though at least some are not members of either party.

Maybe he’s saying it’s as great a threat to democracy to be singled out by the democratic institutions – which are supposed to be seeing both sides – because he’s a dissenter or a communicator who is different from other people.

Anderson: The concern that I’m raising with the Jesse Watters case is not that it was friendly towards Trump. It’s that Watters changed his reporting to fit Trump’s narrative after Trump misquoted him.

Trump tweeted something that was a lie: He said “Jesse Watters said ‘XYZ’” and Watters didn’t – Trump added to Watters’ words. That was going to be a problem for Trump because he would have been caught misquoting Watters. So Watters fixed that by going back and matching Trump’s words.

The bottom line is that Trump has shown a willingness in the course of a campaign and presidency to influence the press in ways that other politicians have not.

Trying to get the media to give you a friendly news framing is politics as usual. Paying people with secret deals, or by intimidating or punishing journalists, that’s an entirely different thing. Regardless of whether Trump is convicted of a crime this time around, I do believe that this case is illustrative of his relationship with the media and how he thinks about it differently than other people who’ve been president of the United States.

Bakken: In 1996 I ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress in my home district in Wisconsin. I lost in the primary.

I have some experience in trying to convince somebody in the media to write a favorable article by giving a reporter information.

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