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The Financial Press—or Anti-Trump Political Chorus?

By Walter Donway

May 9, 2025

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Unlike today’s openly partisan mainstream media, the financial press claims a kind of professional neutrality.

Financial journalism has long held itself apart. Unlike today’s openly partisan mainstream media, the financial press claims a kind of professional neutrality, a focus on data, outcomes, and forces that move markets and shape investor confidence. We expect CNBC, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and even The New York Times business section to serve not a political agenda, but the investor’s need for reliable information and clarity amid noise. That assumption now has gone the way of counting on virginity on our wedding night.​

In the early months of Donald Trump’s second term as president, which brought us the tariff thrust and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the financial press has not so much reported economic developments as narrated them with a tone of uniform alarm. The economic apocalypse, we are told, is Trump, Trump, Trumping toward our businesses, our families, our jobs, the stock markets, and “the world order.”

Every story is filtered by journalists through a now-familiar set of assumptions.

This is not the run-of-the-mill complaint about “media bias”—although there certainly is that, too—but about conformity. It is not that the financial press consistently gets facts wrong but that it consistently sees them through the same lens. Every story is filtered by journalists through a now-familiar set of assumptions: that President Trump’s policies are reckless, destabilizing, and economically self-defeating; that his decisions are never strategic gambits but erratic lurches; and that the global economic order teeters on the brink of collapse because of his actions.​

A few examples:

  1. MarketWatch: “GDP shrinks for first time in 3 years as Trump tariffs trigger record trade deficit. Tip of the iceberg?”
  2. The Wall Street Journal: “Trump’s Trade War Threatens One of America’s Top Energy Exports” ​
  3. Bloomberg: “Trump’s China Tariffs Set to Unleash Supply Shock on US Economy” ​
  4. Barron’s: “Trump’s Trade War Pushes Firms to Consider Stockpiling” ​
  5. CBS News: “DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says” ​
  1. The Wall Street Journal: “Tomatoes Become One of the First Everyday Casualties of Trade War”
  2. The Wall Street Journal: “Trump’s Trade War Is Threatening to Derail the Office-Market Recovery”
  3. AP News: “U.S. economy shrinks 0.3% in first quarter as Trump trade wars disrupt businesses”
  4. Wall Street Journal: “China’s Export Orders Plunge, Hit by Trump’s Trade War”

In hundreds, now thousands, of stories, there is one tone and one vocabulary: “threaten,” “scary,” “new order,” “chaos,” “stagflation,” and always “Trump’s trade war.” Has the required core narrative been distributed to all reporters over the media wire: Trump has launched a war—not just a trade war, but a war on stability, normalcy, markets, and the world economy?​ The Media Research Center reported on April 28, 2025, that its analysis of the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts shows the new Trump administration has faced a 92% negative coverage, even worse than the relentlessly hostile coverage Trump faced in early 2017.

On April 16, Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank, urged developing countries to liberalize trade, saying many maintained higher tariffs than advanced economies and lowering them could offset the risk of reciprocal import taxes. He urged them to make a deal with the United States as fast as possible and, at the same time, release “untapped potential in deeper regional integration for developing countries.” As of April 30, I could not find that story in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, or Barron’s, but the Fairfield Times deemed it important enough to report. And Breitbart News. When questioners asked Banga about the cuts to foreign aid that the Trump administration has made, he urged them to remember that such aid is temporary, not a permanent source of support. No story in the financial press.

The headlines convey judgments instead of open questions. The idea that Trump’s tariff policy might work as a negotiating strategy is acknowledged, but with nothing akin to the benefit of the doubt. After all, even Adam Smith said the one plausible justification of tariffs is to get your trade partners to negotiate free trade. The DOGE cuts (media term: “meat axe”) are disruptive and painful to some employees? But we always knew they would be as the federal bureaucracy bloated over the decades; perhaps that is why there never has been much political will to cut. Has this angle been explored seriously by the media? That most nations, over 50, chose negotiation over retaliation when Trump launched his “reciprocal tariff” campaign? Buried deep, if occasionally acknowledged with the label “Trump claims.”​

The uniformity of language produces that 1984 lobotomizing effect. Where are the alternative frames? Why is it almost always “Trump’s trade war”—never “Trump’s strategy for reciprocal tariffs,” “Trump’s push to equalize trade barriers,” or “Trump’s pressure campaign for fairer terms”? Why must the narrative always play on the extreme negative connotations of “war”?​

Probably, this acute journalistic tilt flows not entirely from Left Democratic ideology but from incentive structure. Dramatic stories draw clicks; “market plunge” is more exciting than “market correction.” The story of a dangerous president toppling a fragile world order is simply more gripping than the possibility of targeted disruption to correct long-standing trade imbalances. In today’s media economy, the market for panic is always bullish.​

The financial press did not moderate its bias during the Obama years. Except then the economic crises were framed, when they were reported as crises at all, as political dysfunction or legislative gridlock. The 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, which genuinely skirted national default, was reported soberly, and the press placed responsibility on “Congress,” not the president. Obama’s economic policies, from the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) to fiscal stimulus to capital-gains hikes, were debated with mixed but respectful tones. Few headlines forecast disaster; none routinely tied every downturn to “Obama’s America.” The media still did not distinguish between analysis and editorial slant, but it slanted to a different ideology.​

Yeva Nersisyan, associate professor and department chair of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College, writing in the Hill, recounted the stubbornly high unemployment, unchecked buildup to the financial crisis, and other economic problems during the Obama administration and concluded: “After the 2020 election, I wrote an op-ed arguing that Joe Biden would do well to remember the mistakes of Obama’s presidency.… I sent the op-ed to a liberal friend who liked it but cautioned it would never be published in any mainstream outlet. Obama was still too highly regarded and beloved among Democrats. Any critique of him would not see the light of day. She was right.”

Today, there is a troubling lack of differentiation across outlets. The Wall Street Journal, long the journalistic voice of pro-market detachment, sounds now, in its news pages, indistinguishable from The New York Times. Bloomberg and MarketWatch, competing for clicks and attention, escalate language in tandem. The financial press may not share a political line editorially, but in the so-called “news pages,” there is both political and narrative lockstep. And once a narrative framing gains momentum— “trade war,” “reckless cuts,” “market chaos”—it becomes a kind of collective truth, repeated until alternatives seem illegitimate.​

Ironically, and tellingly, the Wall Street Journal reporting staff criticizes the editorial department for lacking evidence for its opinions. It seems that the reporters felt their editorializing news stories were sounder opinion. It has long been known and sometimes earned a snicker that the editorial staff and reporters are sniping at each other from their respective trenches. In 2020, more than 280 Journal journalists and Dow Jones staff members wrote a letter to the publisher criticizing the opinion pages for “lack of fact-checking and transparency.”

Even in hindsight, the media show little curiosity about whether or not their previous warnings panned out. After Trump’s first term, economic retrospectives acknowledged that the promised catastrophes often failed to arrive. The global economy did not collapse. The trade deficit did not improve, but neither did tariffs cause systemic financial breakdown. Deregulation did not yield miracles, but it did not unleash an apocalypse. Yet the tone today is the same—or even more shrill.​

Trump’s policies deserve—even cry out for—scrutiny.

Yes, yes, Trump’s policies deserve—even cry out for—scrutiny. Tariffs, federal layoffs, and government restructuring that includes discontinuing whole departments and agencies are serious interventions. But scrutiny is different from choral harmony. Financial journalism should inform, not try to guide investor opinion by its language, tone, and projections. It should dissect, not dramatize.​

A 2023 Gallup Poll found that 27% of Independents, 14% of Republicans, and 70% of Democrats had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the media….”  Those numbers become more meaningful in light of another poll the same year reporting that half of Americans indicated they believe national news organizations “intend to mislead, misinform or persuade the public to adopt a particular point of view through their reporting.” Well, if 50% of Americans say the media “intends” to mislead, misinform, and push a viewpoint, most of that must reflect Republican suspicions—not the 70% of Democrats who had a “great deal or fair” confidence.

When financial media become indistinguishable from the political opposition, they risk their prime asset: credibility.

When financial media become indistinguishable from the political opposition, they risk their prime asset: credibility. And when they craft stories to fit a preloaded frame, they cease to serve the investor’s interest and begin to reinforce the public’s distrust of all journalism.

The question, again, is not whether Trump’s policies are right or wrong. The question is whether the financial press is still in the business of informing and raising questions or already knows the answer, headline by headline.​

 

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