You’ve seen them yank endorsements, sand down headlines, play both sides, and bend the knee at Mar-a-Lago. There’s a movement in media c-suites to get right with Donald Trump, or at least to be a little less antagonistic. It’s going to fail, and it’s going to fail badly.

News organizations had established something of a playbook during the first Trump era. Head-on challenges to the fashy right competed with the pretend-objective “view from nowhere.” Old-fashioned muckraking was rebranded as a defense of democracy and the rule of law. The suits were never quite comfortable with the approach, which could feel one-note and preachy on its lesser days. But for a while, it was seen as good for business and traffic, and maybe the right thing to do.

That started to change in 2022, when CNN’s new owners installed Chris Licht as the network’s CEO. Some of the more vocal anti-MAGA voices were out. Down-the-middle was back in. Trump got himself a town hall. It was a disaster. CNN’s core audience — and many of its staffers — saw the new direction as a betrayal of the network’s mission. Trump fans had a whole other network that spoke to them. Ratings collapsed. Advertising revenue plummeted. Licht was gone after 13 months.

Yet somehow, his tenure became something of a template. Maybe not at CNN, which command-Z’d many of Licht’s changes, but definitely elsewhere. Media execs, in ways subtle and not, began to rewrite a playbook that they had come to read as too sanctimonious, too willing to follow left-wing orthodoxies.

Some did so in the most self-destructive ways possible. The most notable was Washington Post boss Jeff Bezos, whose decision to spike an endorsement of Kamala Harris 11 days before the election cost the paper more than 250,000 subscribers. (At least a $50 million error, by my back-of-the-napkin math.) Bezos didn’t make things better by tweeting his “big congratulations” to Trump after the election, or pledging to “help” him. But at least Bezos didn’t make like Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who agreed on Fox News to “redo the entire paper” to make it more MAGA-friendly. (His executive editor had to email the staff the next day to say the boss didn’t really mean it.)

Even if he did, it wouldn’t work. There’s no evidence that moving to a both-sidesy middle will bring in new readers, and plenty of evidence it won’t. Over the last decade — but especially this year — audiences have moved away from establishmentarian, middle-of-the-road outlets, and towards voices they see as raw and authentic. That’s one reason why Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper’s podcast studios became such important stops on the campaign trail this time around, and why CNN has consistently had so much trouble catching Fox and MSNBC in the ratings. The “view from nowhere” is inherently unappealing. Trump’s hardest core is completely poisoned against mainstream media brands, and no amount of right-wing commentary will provide an antidote. The rest of us can see right through a brand of mock objectivity that hides the facts it pretends to showcase, like when The New York Times transformed Trump’s eugenics vitriol into his “long fascination with genes.” Business Insider’s Adam Rogers calls it “a view from distinctly somewhere — a place outside petty intellectual and earthly concerns. It’s the confidence of people who think they’re beyond the chance of consequences.”

It’s the confidence of people who think they can kiss Trump’s ass and he’ll leave them alone. There’s even less evidence for that belief. On the contrary, Trump has regularly attacked media allies like Fox News for stepping one foot out of line. On December 4, the incoming president went after Fox’s sister organization, The Wall Street Journal — a paper which has a famously conservative editorial board, but also the temerity to note that Trump’s pick to lead the D.E.A. had withdrawn.

News outlets can handle the social media rants. But Trump has also repeatedly tried to tie media companies up in bogus lawsuits that drain attention and resources. On Halloween, Trump’s lawyers demanded $10 billion in damages from CBS for not editing a Kamala Harris interview to his liking. In early November, Trump’s lawyers threatened the Times and Penguin Random House with another $10 billion hit for a book and a collection of articles he deemed unfair.

As president, Trump will have the ability to do worse. His pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, once said he’d “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Patel’s allies now say he was just using “hyperbole” to prove a point, as if his boss hadn’t threatened revenge on a broad range of enemies, including some in the press. Trump’s already threatened the broadcast licenses of CBS and ABC. He called for NBC — the network that gave us “The Apprentice” — to be investigated for treason. His cronies, now poised for major administration positions, want to reverse Biden-era rules limiting when the government can grab reporters’ emails, texts, and phone records. Trump went further, publicly fantasizing about the prison rape of those journalists who don’t immediately comply. “You might add the publisher and editor to the list,” the once-and-future leader of the free world added. That might explain why some of them are hustling to get on Trump’s good side, but it doesn’t mean it’ll have the desired effect.