Joe Nuno
Well-Known Member
Media Ban! Making Sense of the War Between Trump and the Press
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On Friday, February 24th, the Trump administration issued a “gaggle” against reporters from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Politico, prohibiting them from gaining access to the White House press briefing. The ban was quickly followed by a boycott of the press meeting by Time magazine and the Associated Press. To their credit, these two outlets did what White House reporters should have already done – stop attending press conferences dominated by obvious fabrications, distortions, and propaganda. If MSNBC’s Morning Joe can divorce itself from the lies of Kellyanne Conway, certainly the New York Times can too, right? But losing access is the ultimate kiss of death in corporate journalism. The core of this system is based on maintaining access to high-level officials, so being blacklisted from press briefings is a devastating blow to establishment reporters.
The loss of access could be interpreted as the best thing to ever happen to papers like the New York Times. Instead of amplifying every absurd utterance out of the mouth of a carnivalesque tabloid president, they could be focusing instead on hard-hitting investigative journalism that would benefit the public. But in a media system where official sources are king, it’s unlikely the editors of major news outfits will see things this way. Predictably, they have expressed anger at being cut out of the loop of the Washington political power structure.
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