Conventional wisdom:
If you think moving the press out of the White House won’t be cheered by lots of people who voted for Trump, you are wrong.
— Chris Cillizza (@TheFix) January 15, 2017
Yeah. And. So. What? I swear, between Trump’s press conference shitshow last week and the high dudgeon over Trump’s spokesman saying maybe we won’t even GIVE you nice desks in the White House anymore, American journalism is having the biggest freakouts over the stupidest things.
Three-decade assault on the press, co-opting entire news networks to debate for days exactly how much they suck? YAWN. Move my mug of very special pens? AUX ARMES, AUX BARRICADES!
Of COURSE Trump beating on the press will make Trump’s voters happy. They voted for him because they wanted him to do stuff like that. They wanted him to make big, dumb, loud fart noises in the direction of everything that bugs them. But I don’t understand why the press should worry if Trump’s voters hate them.
They’re not running for office. They don’t get elected. Their jobs are not determined by anyone but them. It’s not a fucking beauty contest. If they know they are in the right — and they are, most of them, except those Breitbart tools — then Trump can hoot and holler and move their desks into the Potomac and the only thing that matters at the end of the day is if as much information as possible got to as many people as possible.
That’s it. That’s the job. And if you tell me you need a comfy chair to do it in, or a daily petting from a press secretary, I will direct you to half a hundred hungry people who will gladly shove your ass to the curb so that they can do the job from wherever they have to do it to get it done. Trump’s voters aren’t happy with you? His press secretary’s being mean? Well, why don’t you raise a big bitchfest on Twitter about it! That will surely not make you look dumb in any way.
Schmucks.
A.
I used to assign reporters to cover stuff for a living. If I was assigning reporters to cover the White House I believe I’d assign the newest person on the reportorial totem pole to sit in the White House press room, just to make sure if the President dropped dead I’d have somebody there to write the obit.
No one could have helped but notice that the Watergate reporting team for the WaPo didn’t sit in the White House press room and they did a pretty fair job of figuring out what was going on. I’ve watched those WH press briefings and they’re useless in terms of news value. Paying your ‘senior White House correspondent’ big bucks to sit there and listen to canned BS is ridiculous, a waste of valuable resources that could be used to dig out actual news.
Maybe banning the press from the WH will be the best thing that’s happened in the last century to encourage actual reporting, instead of stenography and the awful plague of access journalism. At least a person can hope.