New York Magazine Photoshops Trump to Look Like Pig on Cover
In a far cry from the media treatment afforded former President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump has now been portrayed on the cover of a leading liberal magazine as a pig.
The most recent issue of New York Magazine uses a photoshopped illustration of Trump to garner attention for a piece that, it claims, exposes “corruption” in the president’s administration, according to The Hill. The piece attacks Trump without citing sources for its claims.
The article in question, written by Jonathan Chait, says Trump’s presidency has featured rampant corruption, the likes of which has not been seen in more than a century.
“Not only has Trump made no effort to raise ethical standards but he and his administration have flamboyantly violated the existing guidelines,” Chait wrote. “Lobbyists are seeded in every agency, ‘regulating’ their former employers and designing rules that favor bosses over employees and business owners over consumers.”
In an accompanying piece in the same issue of the magazine, titled “501 Days in Swampland,” Joy Crane, Nick Tabor and claimed Trump is making money off the presidency.
Trump, the article said, is “landing loans for his businesses, steering wealthy buyers to his condos, securing cheap foreign labor for his resorts, preserving federal subsidies for his housing projects, easing regulations on his golf courses, licensing his name to overseas projects, even peddling coffee mugs and shot glasses bearing the presidential seal.”
“For Trump, whose business revolves around the marketability of his name, there has proved to be no public policy too big, and no private opportunity too crass, to exploit for personal profit,” the piece read.
Portraying Trump in an objectionable manner has been standard media practice ever since he first announced his presidential campagin. This differs from the treatment afforded Obama.
In 2014, cartoonist Ted Rall found that out when the liberal website Daily Kos refused to allow his work on the site, saying his version of Obama was racist.
“It’s the height of arrogance and authoritarianism to ask me to change the way that I depict the president,” Rall said at the time, according to the The Wrap. “I’ve been doing this since 1987 and I’ve earned the right to not be branded a racist.”
“It’s not a left thing,” Rall said. “It’s a squishy liberal thing and it’s not an accusation that should be tossed around lightly.”
Not only did the media protect the image of the president in its depictions of him, it also protected him in its reporting, as admitted by CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“(P)resident Obama said things that weren’t true and got away with it more for a variety of reasons, and one is the media was much more supportive of him,” Tapper said in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, according to The Washington Times.
Trump, who in January offered to give awards to America’s most corrupt media outlets, has since been subject to a series of unsourced media attacks calling him corrupt.
Posting on KPRC radio’s website, Sandra Peterson sought to put the media’s efforts to fight Trump in context, in this case focusing on its brief obsession with porn star Stormy Daniels and her claims about Trump.
“This time around, the media doesn’t control the message or the information. We all knew about Trump and his lifestyle choices. He never hid them. We also remember how the media treated anyone who disagreed with the coverage they afforded Clinton,” Peterson wrote.
“This time it is different. This time, the media can’t kill the beast. And how they spin themselves into little tornadoes of futility is absolutely a joy to watch,” she added.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.