There was an incredible segment on “The Last Word” last night, that was a wake up call to the MSM as to what has already happened, how it is, and what is coming in the future under the Trump administration, especially from Hair Furor. The warning was delivered by none other than the esteemed current professor, and former chair of the Journalism department of New York University, Jay Rosen. He is alarmed, and for good reason.
Not only is the MSM being played, they’ve gotten complacent. It has now been something like 155 days since President Elect Trump’s last official press conference. This has caused tremendous wailing, gnashing of teeth, and hand wringing from the media about the President to be’s standoffish attitude to the press. The press is used to regular access to the President. And it’s just beginning.
The incoming White House Press Secretary, the despicable former media mouthpiece for the RNC, Sean Spicer, signaled that this might be the sign of things to come. In a radio interview he stated that President Trump does not look at the past in order to follow precedents, he looks to set his own course. Spicer hinted that the trend will continue, with Trump continuing to take his message directly to “the people”, not just with massive rallies, but with more intimate town halls. This serves two purposes. First, it makes his message directly available to his core base, the people he really wants to keep on his side. Note that this is not the majority of the American people, who didn’t vote for him. Second, in doing this in public gatherings, it makes it difficult, if not impossible for the media to get direct access to him to ask him questions.
Professor Rosen has advised the media to throw out the old playbook. Trump is not going to play by the rules, he will eschew press conferences, mislead and ditch the press when he can, and generally freeze out “the enemy” every chance he gets. The MSM is going to have to forget decades of precedent and go back to the basics. Good old fashioned, shoe leather, hitting the phones and knocking on doors journalism. No more automatic sound bites. Time to do your job.
Professor Rosen wrote a compelling ARTICLE in pressthink.org that laid the situation into clear context. It is lengthy, and rather press oriented wonkish, and is in fact part one of at least two pieces, but it sounded a stark and clear warning and clarion call to the media in dealing with the incoming Trump administration.
That warning was clear. Forget access! Media types, especially television types tend to spend large amounts of time trying to get “exclusive” interviews with the man himself, or at least one of his top aides. Forget that shit. Trump is not going to be granting a lot of interviews, and when he does, he is going to say exactly what he wants to say and stick with it. Forget people like KellyAnne Conway and Sean Spicer, they’re paid shills, they’ll spout the Trump line and hold firm to it, regardless of what dissenting information is thrown at them. And putting empty suits like Jeffrey Lord on CNN, in the banal name of “fairness and balance” serves no purpose, they’re useless.
In his excellent article, Dr Rosen explains it better than a cheap hack like me ever could, and he does it in blunt terms for the media. He deals directly with the mindset and intentions of the Trump media operation in one devastating paragraph;
26. Don’t make it all about access to the President and his aides, or preserving the routines of White House reporting, as the press corps is currently doing— mostly out of habit. A Trump presidency is likely to be constructed on a propaganda model in which fomenting confusion is not a drag on the Administration’s agenda but a sign that it’s working. Access to such a machinery could wind up enlisting the press in a misinformation campaign. Here, I am getting ahead of the story because we don’t really know what a Trump White House will be like. And I am not saying that access to the president and his top advisors is unimportant or a dirty word. Rather, it should not be the organizing principle for journalists who are preparing to cover Trump.
There is the warning, in big red flashing letters to the media. Forget about your credentials, forget about your precious “access”, forget about your sources. We are about to embark on an administration of informational insularity that we have not seen since the time of Richard Nixon. You can’t uncover anything from inside, unless you happen to have a source who is disgruntled with the way Trump is doing things. You have to dig into what he’s saying publicly, what he’s doing, what his administration is doing. Go to ground, do the leg work and create the stories. If the fourth estate wants a chance to redeem itself, and at least try to ensure its relevance moving forward, this is the perfect place to state. As a point of reference, here is Lawrence O’Donnell’s interview with professor Rosen from earlier last night.