10 Reasons the Media Treated the Signal Leak as a Scandal
U.S. media usually goes easy on Trump, giving him a pass on behavior they'd cover as a scandal if it were anyone else. But not this time.
The Signal leak is the rare Trump scandal the media treated as an actual scandal. In mainstream outlets like the New York Times and CNN, it was the lead story for days, with frequent updates, reporting from various angles, analysis pieces in the news section, and commentary in the opinion section. Other topics have taken the top spot—so much is happening—but “Signalgate” remains an ongoing story with regular reporting, and will have a long tail.
Headlines, the only part many people see while scrolling social media, presented Team Trump’s response critically—USA Today, March 2025: “Trump admin scrambles to defend group text leak”—rather than simply repeat it as fact. For comparison, here’s NPR in August 2024: “Trump again distances himself from Project 2025”.
Even some usually Trump-friendly outlets, such as the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, are giving the Signal leak a lot of attention, much of it negative.
Coverage like that—widespread, critical, sustained—has a different impact than a few fact-based pieces. It creates narrative, which reaches a wider audience, prompts more reactions, stays longer in people’s minds, and provides a framework for future stories.
Media has always had trouble covering Trump’s scandalous behavior. There’s so much that they rarely stay focused. Plus his supporters like it (or conveniently deny it), and it generates attention. The result is media bias in his favor, holding him to a lower standard than any other president or major party nominee.
In 2023-2024, the New York Times employed scandal volume and tone for Joe Biden’s age, and accusations of plagiarism against Harvard president Claudiune Gay, but not for more serious Trump scandals. At times, they treated Trump’s lawbreaking and criminal prosecutions almost as a prestige TV “how will he get out of this one” anti-hero drama.
But the Signal leak is different. Here are ten possible reasons why this, of all the Trump scandals, got scandal coverage:
1–About National Security
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sharing war plans in an unsecured group chat, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz accidentally inviting a journalist, is an egregious information security breach. It indicates a broad mishandling of national security issues, which the media usually weigh highly.
Criticizing the execution of military policy provides an opportunity to speak truth to power while remaining nonpartisan. The withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 ended Joe Biden’s “honeymoon period,” with coverage and public opinion turning negative, never to recover. Similarly, the Signal leak appears to be ending Trump’s.
Some Republicans still take national security seriously, and while they might bite their tongue if they disagree with Trump’s foreign policy choices, the Signal scandal is about process and execution. On CNN, Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) criticized the administration for treating this like a PR problem rather than an information security breach, telling Wolf Blitzer the White House’s “credibility is suspect when [they] cannot even admit that this was wrong."
2–Not Focused on Trump
This is Trump’s fault—he appointed these people, and encourages them to break federal laws—but he’s not at the center of this story. Cult of personality defenses and old Trump vs. Media dynamics don’t really apply.
But every other leading member of the Trump administration was in that group chat, giving the media a cast of new and returning characters. Besides Hegseth and Waltz, there’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, and more.
Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Patel were already scheduled to appear before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees for the annual hearings on worldwide threats, and got grilled on the Signal leak. They dissembled (poorly), and Gabbard in particular appeared to lie, creating more reporting and commentary.
3–It Was Hidden
A weird thing about the Trump era: Much of the media and public act like corruption, lawbreaking, and other malfeasance are okay if done openly, without apparent shame — as if they’re bad only if officials do it in secret and get caught. Trump pockets money from foreign governments in blatant violation of the Constitution, but does so brazenly, in front of everyone, and both the media and Congress let it go.
But Trump officials’ war deliberations on Signal were secret. The public knows about them only because Mike Waltz screwed up, and the exposure suggests more secret communications for reporters to ferret out. Hegseth and Co. first responded by lying that the group chat was made up, or at least didn’t include war plans. As Jamelle Bouie writes, the “(idiotic) aphorism that the ‘cover-up is worse than the crime’ has kicked the scandal instinct into gear."
In this case there are multiple crimes, each a lot worse than the cover-up. But still, the media is more comfortable going “gotcha” at officials trying to hide something, than getting into another “this is bad” - ”no it’s not, you’re bad” argument with Donald Trump.
4–The Media Loves Covering Itself
Many journalists fantasize about becoming Woodward and Bernstein, exposing malfeasance that goes to the very top. The hero of Signalgate is Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
To his and The Atlantic’s credit, they published the info quickly, rather than holding it for a book as some other journalists have. And they’ve presented it soberly, letting the public shock come from the information itself rather than from sensationalist framing.
Goldberg’s central role also helps explain why more media organizations have been willing to use the word “lie.” Many outlets shy from it, instead describing Trump’s lies with milder euphemisms, or presenting them as possibly true to avoid appearing “biased.” But when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Goldberg about Hegseth’s claim that no war plans were in the group chat, he responded bluntly: “no, that’s a lie.”
The Atlantic subsequently proved it by releasing screenshots from the Signal chat. That got its own mini newscycle, with news pieces using the word “lie” and range of figures criticizing Hegseth for lying, from Fox News’ Brit Hume and National Review writer Mark Antonio Wright to Democratic Senator and decorated veteran Tammy Duckworth.
5–Trapped by Their Own Pathologies
A normal White House response to an embarrassing scandal, especially one without the president personally involved, is to admit error, promise to get to the bottom of it, fire some officials, and move on. But as Greg Sargent and Zack Beauchamp argue, that would go against this administration’s very essence.
Trump’s approach to politics (and other things) is always fight, never apologize. He demands the same from his staffers, no matter how ridiculous it makes them sound. His cult-of-personality authoritarianism requires everyone around him to pretend he’s infallible, even if he reverses a previous stance, or the White House obviously messes up.
When the issue is minor, that technique can muddy the waters and get the press to move on. With something as big and unambiguous as texting war plans to a reporter, combative denial perpetuated the story instead.
6–Attacking the Media Won’t Work
As if by default, Trump officials tried to deflect criticism by attacking the media. Asked by The Guardian to comment on Goldberg’s accusations, Pete Hegseth said “you’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes.” Trying to support Hegseth, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt chastised the White House press corps: “do you trust the Secretary of Defense… or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a registered Democrat?”
But the entire media profession knows that Hegseth’s description doesn’t fit Goldberg at all. And shortly after Leavitt’s comment, the Atlantic published the group chat, proving that everyone should not trust the Secretary of Defense.
A few days later, Hegseth is sputtering, while Leavitt declines to rule out firings over the Signal leak.
7–No Whatabouts, No Way to “Both Sides”
One of Republicans’ go-to moves in response to Trump scandals is whataboutism. Instead of trying to defend it on the merits, they change the subject to a different but vaguely related bad action by someone else, ideally a political opponent, as if two wrongs make a right (or at least an okay) and it’s hypocritical to object to the first one. This often works—unfortunately—by playing to partisan tribalism, and to mainstream media’s preference for “Both Sides” coverage that presents America’s two major parties as equal and opposite.
But no one in the Biden or Obama administrations, no Democrat in any context, did anything remotely equivalent to Hegseth texting war plans and Waltz accidentally inviting Goldberg to see them. On information security in general, there’s Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but that was over a decade ago, and Republicans already stretched it to defend Trump’s criminal retention of national defense documents (among other things).
Conducting any national security discussion on Signal is, on its own, a worse version of Hillary’s email server. Leaking the discussions to Goldberg is beyond even the most dedicated whataboutist. And there’s no way to spin it as owning the libs.
8–Not About Word Choice
Another go-to defense is parsing language, but that isn’t working here either. Hegseth insists there were “no war plans,” as did Rubio and Leavitt, because the plans didn’t include every single detail. Hegseth then tried claiming vindication when The Atlantic called them “attack plans,” but few think that’s a relevant difference. Partial or full, and whatever the label, no one should be sharing military operational details, especially not in advance.
Similarly, Trump officials are lying that the information wasn’t classified, as if that would make it okay. They’re trying to rerun the playbook that thwarted his criminal prosecution for illegally retaining classified documents. Trump insisted they weren’t classified, despite no evidence he did anything in office to declassify them. It was absurd, but with the help of a loyalist judge, and the legal profession’s predilection for technicalities, it delayed the trial long enough for Trump to regain the presidency.
But while Trump officials likely committed crimes by exposing national defense secrets—though won’t face prosecution due to Trump’s corruption of the Justice Department—Signalgate is a political scandal, not a criminal case. Official classification status is besides the point.
In the Senate hearing, Tulsi Gabbard claimed she didn’t know if the information was classified, prompting incredulous Senators to ask how, as head of the U.S. intelligence community, she wouldn’t know.
In the White House Briefing Room, when Leavitt tried the “not classified” defense, a reporter asked the obvious follow up: “Why aren't launch times on a mission strike classified?”
Classified or not, no matter what the administration calls it, they look incompetent.
9–It’s Funny
It’s unsettling if you think through the implications of these incompetents running U.S. national security, but at the surface level this is funny. It’s so stupid, like something out of Veep, and didn’t cause any immediate problems, making it great fodder for jokes. And not the gallows humor people use to cope with crazy and awful things, but some old school point-and-laugh at powerful people being dumbasses.
The Signal leak is the first thing of Trump’s term that’s more funny than scary. Social media users and late night comedians are having fun with it, and the jokes are spreading beyond political spaces. That gives the story legs, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see callback jokes months from now.
10–Democrats on the Air
Media broke the Signal leak story, but Democrats’ public criticism helped perpetuate it. Along with questions at the fortunately-timed annual threat hearings, Congressional Democrats have pointedly criticized the administration in a variety of places, online and off. That, in turn, gets coverage and reactions, including in conservative media.
“Veteran Dem senator demands Hegseth resign over Signal chat leak,” reads a Fox News headline, referring to Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
“Democrat laughs at CNBC host bringing up Afghan pullout as example of worse incompetence than Signal screw up,” reads another, about Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.
Republicans and Fox are trying to counter it, but they’re arguing on Trump critics’ turf. “Dems are trying to ‘overblow’ Signal leak ‘mistake’, creating a ‘faux controversy’, says GOP senator,” reads a headline about Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Maine.
More often, mainstream outlets are covering what Fox and Republicans are up in arms about. This time, it went the other way. Democrats should take the lesson that they don’t have to passively accept that Trump and right-wing media always control the national narrative. Democrats can shape it too.