![]() ![]() In doing so, Trump-Spicer snipped the peak off of the protest coverage by making muddy what was clear about the audience size. So Trump sent his press secretary out to essentially speak one of his tweets by falsely stating that “the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period” viewed the Trump event. On Saturday, the obvious news peg for the press was well-attended protests against his inauguration in Washington, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and elsewhere in the world. The more outrageous and self-serving (or should I say “self-dealing”?) the tweets are, the better his results. Whenever he finds the noose of news lowering over his thick orange neck, he takes to Twitter to change the subject. It means we’re onto a story.” Rather than treat the Spicer, Trump, Conway ingenuities as an excuse to pout and leave the field, the experienced members of the press will be propelled by the weekend to pick up their mobiles and notebooks and go maximum Fahrenthold on the administration.Īs I’ve hypothesized before, there is a method to Trump’s tweets. To quote from Jon Ronson once again, “It’s good for journalists to feel demeaned. But their maker designed reporters to be resilient, to take disparagement, derision, scorn, and sneering from lying government officials in stride. Others, such as media scholar Jay Rosen, are stating that the press corps should perhaps think about avoiding interviews with Conway if all she’s going to do is contradict Trump rather than speak for him.īoycotts and bans may fill a journalists’ heart with vengeance, or at least keep it from being bruised. CNN’s Brian Stelter says he hears from readers that reporters should boycott Spicer’s press briefings in protest of his misrepresentations. ![]() Emotion fuels their sense of justice and motivates them to keep on keeping on. Reporters tend to be emotional souls, which gives them an advantage when hauling a load of bricks up a ladder for their ungrateful, demanding editors and indifferent readers. Instead, as everybody knows, he excavated the self-dealing garbage dump that was the Trump Foundation as if he were an archeologist and published a series of patient stories that resulted in a penalty against the foundation and its planned closure. Fahrenthold could have assessed the Trump candidacy by filling Twitter with angry comments or by setting himself on fire. One of our examples should be the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold. Extraordinary times like these call for normal measures: The meticulous, aggressive, and calm presentation of the news. The opening minutes of the Trump administration-the lies told by press secretary Sean Spicer about the size of the inauguration crowd, the president’s whopper at CIA headquarters claiming the media made up his feud with the agency, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway’s notion that “ alternative facts” support Trump’s imaginary numbers-have stirred bladder-emptying panic among some in the press corps.īut the Trump administration cannot by itself pollute the river of truth with its bogus tweets, its press conferences in which no questions are allowed, or by Conway jibber jabber. Extraordinary times-and we are living in an extraordinary time-do not necessarily call for extraordinary measures on the part of the press, as comforting as a full berserking might make many of us feel.
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