Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Media, Still Bloodied By Election Fiasco, Trying With All Its Intensity To Make Trump Look Bad. However, They Forget, That Is NOT Their Role.

Shapiro at 'National Review': Memo To Media: It's Not About You

Alex Wong/Getty Images
JANUARY 25, 2017
839318 Comments4633
On Saturday, Trump press secretary Sean Spicer created a media firestorm by
 fibbing about sizes of inauguration crowds. After calling a press conference to
 claim that Trump’s inauguration had the largest audience in history, both “in 
person and around the globe,” Spicer tore into the media for their supposed 
falsehoods; Spicer specifically referenced D.C. Metro figures, fencing and 
magnetometer placement, and floor coverings that highlighted empty spaces
 on the National Mall. None of his claims were true.
NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump top adviser Kellyanne Conway about Spicer’s 
routine. “I’m curious,” he said, “why President Trump chose yesterday to send 
out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes
 to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd size. I guess my question to you 
is, Why do that?” Conway futzed about for an answer, variously misdirecting to
 the press’s willingness to ignore President Obama’s widespread lies, Trump’s 
executive actions, and a New York Times reporter’s quickly retracted tweet 
about a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. being removed from the Oval Office.
VIDEOThere is 'no excuse' for confirmation delays: Trump spokesman


Mute
Current Time0:00
/
Duration Time0:00
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
Todd’s question is the right one: What would drive President Trump to spend 
mental energy on a question as silly and meaningless as inaugural crowd 
size? There are dozens of excellent reasons his crowd size didn’t match
 Obama’s; the best reason is that the inauguration takes place in a 
Democratic stronghold, Washington, D.C. (Trump won 4.1 percent of the
 vote there.) Nonetheless, Trump chose to glom on to media coverage of
 crowd size. Why bother? But Todd’s question wasn’t that of the media at
large. Their question quickly turned from one of presidential focus and
 temperament to a far more self-centered one: Why would Trump send
 out his press secretary to lie to them? Why would Trump want to establish
 such an adversarial relationship with the press? Why would Spicer attack
the media?
That personal umbrage from the media drove the coverage throughout the
weekend. On CNN with Brian Stelter, former Hillary Clinton press secretary
 Brian Fallon called Spicer’s comments “an affront to anybody who is on
 our side of the wall and works in this business.” CBS’s Major Garrett
complained, “I’ve never seen anything like this, where it was so intense,
so harsh and passionate right off the beginning.”
This is why Trump wins every time he attacks the media: because the
media are so consumed with themselves, they don’t seem to care about
the public interest. When Spicer returned to the podium on Monday, he
gave the first question to the New York Post rather than the Associated
Press. This sent the collective media into spasms of apoplexy — how dare
 Spicer violate protocol this way? Why did he give questions to the Christian
Broadcasting Network before CNN?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for commenting. Your comments are needed for helping to improve the discussion.