Trump’s War on Media: Real or “Fake”?
- Submitted by: Love Knowledge
- Category: Media
The post Trump’s War on Media: Real or “Fake”? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.
To listen to the reporters who cover the White House, February 24 remains a day of infamy. For them, it seemed to mark a tipping point in their struggles with President Donald Trump, who has declared the media “the enemy.”
That was the day that press secretary Sean Spicer decided to replace a scheduled press briefing with a more informal event in a smaller venue, and to exclude certain reporters, among them those representing The New York Times,the Los Angeles Times, CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, Politico, Buzzfeed, and others.
The journalists did not take this decision well.
“We were all stunned by it,” said New York Times Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller. “I knew it was a big story.” She rushed to get a story up online. “It got huge readership,” she said.
Bumiller’s reactions were echoed by other members of the White House press corps who spoke on March 7 at a conference co-sponsored by the National Press Club and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
The journalists spent much time dissecting what happened, and listing the media outlets that refused to attend the briefing — for example Time magazine and the Associated Press — in solidarity with their excluded colleagues. Reuters correspondent and White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) president Jeff Mason said that even more outlets would have boycotted the briefing if they had known about the hours of WHCA negotiations over the briefing with Spicer that preceded it.
None of the reporters mentioned the other news event of that day. Trump signed an Executive Order designating teams at each federal agency to make sure agencies cut regulations, potentially jeopardizing public health and safety and the environment.
That omission seemed emblematic of the four-hour program, which focused less on the public implications of Trump’s relationship with the media, and more on how it affects reporters personally.
However, the conference did offer some intriguing insights from Ed Rogers and Mike McCurry, longtime Washington insiders and experienced pros at messaging. Rogers worked for Republican Presidents George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. McCurry was Bill Clinton’s press secretary.
They both expressed sympathy for Spicer, particularly when he is asked about the veracity of Trump tweets, like his claim that Obama had wiretapped his phones.
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