The Trump/Musk administration is steering American representative democracy full steam ahead in the direction of the iceberg, and the mainstream news media is literally focusing its attention on rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
“We’re aware of new reports indicating the White House is considering taking over the briefing room seat assignments and want to underscore what we’re doing and what we believe. The White House should abandon this wrong-headed effort and show the American people they’re not afraid to explain their policies and field questions from an independent media free from government control.”
This is a statement from the White House Correspondents’ Association, the outfit that recently bent the knee to the Trumpkins over another point of access, its annual dinner, complying in advance by canceling comedian Amber Ruff as the emcee, because Ruff made it clear that she would incorporate anti-Trump sentiments into her performance at the April 26 soiree.
Sacking Ruff apparently wasn’t enough to keep the Trumpers from putting together a new seating chart for the briefing room as punishment for those who are not yet Trumpy enough, with some major outlets about to lose their front-row seats.
As if having a seat in the front row at White House press briefings in the Trump/Musk alternative truth era is at all important.
Seriously, how about not giving a group of people who regularly lie their way through press avails any camera time going forward, and rededicating the resources expended on having a reporter in the front row and a camera operator on doing actual reporting, rather than serving as stenographers for the wannabe dictator and his stooges?
Stage a Montgomery bus boycott of Trump/Musk, forcing MAGA to rely on its relatively tiny echo chamber to get its talking points out.
On that point, for all the bluster about how well Fox News does in the TV ratings, we’re talking a 3 million viewer average in weeknight primetime in a good week, in a country of 330 million people.
That’s not even one in a 100.
The Trump propaganda machine tailors its message for Fox News, and the message is amplified because everybody else regurgitates the lies without question.
The obvious big issue with Trump/Musk and the media isn’t the stupid seating chart, it’s the propagandizing, and the rote dissemination of the Orwellian playbook by a press that is obviously more focused on having its journos seen on camera than the substance of what an actual independent news media is supposed to do.
“The White House picked this fight and continues to do so,” the WHCA said in its statement on this non-issue. “Our members want to cover the administration without fear or favor, and stand ready to question government officials from any corner of the Brady Briefing Room.
“Let’s be clear about why seats and who assigns them even matter. It’s simple: for the American people,” the statement went on, and here’s where things got ridiculous, borderline insulting.
“For the public to get the information it needs to understand and make decisions about the most powerful office in the world, it needs news produced by experienced, professional journalists who ask tough questions and produce fair coverage.”
The average third-grader knows that this pissing contest isn’t about “tough questions” and “fair coverage”; it’s about access, and the idea that having someone there in person to ask questions that get talking-point non-answers, to be in the race to crank out what the White House wants people to think is the truth, to game the algorithms so that Google and Facebook and Twitter puts your story at the top of the search engines, means that your news org makes a few more pennies per click than the other guys.
An actual “independent media free from government control” wouldn’t want a seat with its name engraved on a nameplate.
Which is how we know we don’t have an “independent media free from government control,” if we’ve ever had one.
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Chris Graham
