Right on. If Trump and his underlings are going to treat the press with disdain, fine, but until he goes full-fascist and creates a Ministry of Truth to begin censoring the media there’s nothing he can do, the media will report, press conferences or not. If even Chris Wallace at Fox News is saying “look at the photos, you can SEE there’s more people in the 2009 photo” then Trump saying “it’s a lie” is going to backfire like the kid with chocolate on his face who blames the dog for eating all the cookies.
My take is that Conway and anyone else Trump sends out should be questioned by the sharpest and quickest journalists we have, who can quickly call BS on the BS, and keep her from changing the subject when it gets uncomfortable. This is what the press is supposed to do.
Trump claimed falsely that the crowd for his swearing-in stretched down
the National Mall to the Washington Monument and totaled more than 1
million people. It did not… “It looked like a million, a million and a half people,” Trump said,
falsely claiming that his crowd “went all the way back to the Washington
Monument.”
Press secretaries and spokespeople exist for a pretty practical reason, not just cynical ones. Their job is to be available for comment because the president very often isn’t. Even when the president does do a press conference, they’re working from a collection of answers that have been workshopped and talking-pointed in advance. If an administration is willing to use the position of press secretary as a font of lies and disinformation, odds are you’d be getting the same bullshit directly from the president’s mouth anyway. Short of a hot mic, one-on-one interviews are probably the best way to break through the wall of politics and spin that exists around any administration. They’re also not frequently given for that very reason (plus, as I mentioned, the president is legitimately a very busy person).
Don’t worry, though. Trump is going to keep using his personal Twitter account, so everyone will be able to get a moment-by-moment look into what the president wants to say every day for the next four years. Raw and unfiltered.
I believe that there will always be Trump friendly news coverage regardless of what mainstream media does. We as the public, as well as the media, owe it to the nation to hold these statements to the fire.
The dems needed more of the “fact checking” seen in the debate much sooner. Knowing what people are concerned about and offering a solution is important. It is also important to educate those who may be misinformed that there is a problem that doesn’t really exist.
I love the idea of blackballing Conway and Spicer, but that only works if every news outlet across the board is in. Otherwise, it won’t accomplish anything. And because you’d never get everyone to go along with it…
Suddenly I’ve put all the fighting about the crowd size out of my mind:
Trump also misrepresented what happened to the weather during his swearing in. He said he felt a few drops of rain as he started delivering his address, but then, “God looked down and, and he said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech… . .The truth is it stopped immediately.”
Light rain continued to fall through the first few minutes of the speech — and VIP’s at the dais took out ponchos, including former president George W. Bush — and then quit. Trump said there was a downpour right after he finished, which did not occur.
“Victim blaming” is another Trump apologist tent-pole. To wit, they wouldn’t have voted in such a manifestly awful person if the left hadn’t been so smug (and/or mean, elite, out-of-touch, hateful, etc).
Not giving the office of the presidency the traditional media respect and attention it has commanded in the past is certainly an option. If the media were to direct their attention away from the white house and focus more on other mechanisms in government besides Trump there might be some interesting outcomes. One being Trump demanding attention come back to him.
Media attention to Trump does not equal pressure on Trump. The mental acrobats we are witnessing in the daily press illustrates that there is wider game being played. Reporters who stick with traditional methods of interaction with power are bound to fail because new power like Trump does not play by old rules.
