Erik Wemple

Commentary -- White House to Jim Acosta: Here’s some ‘due process’

After CNN won a temporary restraining order returning to Jim Acosta his White House press pass, the Trump administration issued a letter informing Acosta of its “preliminary decision” to revoke his hard pass based on his “conduct” at the Nov. 7 news conference. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said, “The White House cannot run an orderly and fair press conference when a reporter acts this way, which is neither appropriate nor professional.

Study: ‘Informed’ Republicans distrust the media in large numbers

As national media organizations contemplate how to mitigate their trust deficit with the American people, a solution emerges from the 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey: Bag the coverage of President Donald Trump and Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency, and go wall-to-wall on zoning hearings, bus-route changes, liquor-license revocations and softball games. Local news, that is. The survey, after all, shows that people trust sources of local reporting far more than national outlets.

What can CNN do to stop President Trump’s abuse?

[Commentary] CNN is sui generis as a target of President Donald Trump’s onslaught against the press. It’s a serially abusive situation.

President Trump’s cultural assault on the First Amendment

[Commentary] There is no shortage of explainers detailing President Donald Trump’s limited ability to mess with the First Amendment. No, he can’t just snap his fingers and “open up” our libel laws so that he can more easily sue news outlets that publish scoops about him. No, he can’t just shut down a large broadcast network whose reporting he doesn’t like. There’s a lot of bluster in the president’s widely disseminated attacks on the press.

Is Fox News part of the mainstream media? It depends.

A joint news conference in February between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prompted numerous complaints from big-time media outlets. They’d been shut out of the Q&A session in favor of news outlets that they considered friendly to the interests of the Trump White House.

In a discussion about the kerfuffle, Fox News host Shannon Bream asked colleague Howard Kurtz whether such outlets had fretted in the past, when Fox News had been iced out. “Nobody much cared about that in the mainstream media,” responded Kurtz. “I guess that Fox News is part of the mainstream media, but….” I guess? Whoa for a moment here. This is Howard Kurtz, Fox News media critic and a longtime observer of the national media scene. And he isn’t 100 percent sure whether his employer is part of the club known as the mainstream media?

Can President Trump outlast the White House press corps?

President Donald Trump has attempted to undercut the US media in a number of ways — by calling them the “enemy”; by denying coverage credentials to certain outlets during his campaign; by telling falsehoods and lying; by siccing his aides on reporters. As we close in on two months of the Trump White House, however, another strategy may be emerging: Outlast the media.

The frenetic nature of the Trump White House was apparent to those who’d watched the frenetic nature of the Trump campaign. “We’re used to Donald Trump as a a candidate making wild accusations at the spur of the moment and that becoming the dominant news story immediately,” says Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker. “So we’re all trained.” And staffed up. Outlets such as Politico — with seven White House reporters — and The Post and the New York Times — six apiece — upped their White House staffing to historic levels. The early weeks raise questions as to whether those deployments will be sufficient.

Sean Spicer’s chilling words

NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker cited a disputed report that Yemen had withdrawn permission to the United States to conduct anti-terrorism ground missions in that country — a result of a raid that resulted in civilian casualties as well as the death of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6. Despite reports and commentary insisting that the operation failed, Spicer has insisted that it was a success. Welker asked him, “Does that not undercut the administration’s ability to fight terrorism in that region, and do you stand by your assessment that it’s a success?” There would be no policy change coming from the podium. “It’s absolutely a success,” said Spicer, whose boss has shown a fondness for labeling his own ventures “successful.” “And I think that anyone who would suggest it’s not a success does disservice to the life of Chief … Owens. He fought knowing what was at stake in that mission, and anybody who would suggest otherwise doesn’t fully appreciate how successful that mission was — what the information that they were able to retrieve was and how that will help prevent future terrorist attacks.”

The message? Uh, media outlets — and anyone else, for that matter — had better not undermine “the success of that” raid — as if questioning the raid after the fact could possibly alter anything about the action.

Sean Spicer now blaming media for President Trump tweet

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer fielded a question about the executive order temporarily barring entry into the United States of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. “He’s also made clear that it’s not a Muslim ban, it’s not a travel ban. It’s a vetting system to keep America safe,” said Spicer. Following up on Spicer’s protestations about the word “ban,” NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker noted the tweet above: “He says it’s a ban.”

Alluding to the wonderful symbiosis and spirit of cooperation between the White House and its press corps, Spicer responded, “He’s using the words that the media’s using,” said Spicer in a tribute to the overwhelming power of the modern media. “But at the end of the day … it can’t be a ban if you’re letting a million people in.” Welker wasn’t going to accept that tripe. So she pointedly noted that the president had called it a ban. “Is he confused or are you confused?” she asked. “No, I’m not confused. I think that the words being used to describe it are derived from what the media is calling this. He has been very clear, it is ‘extreme vetting.'” Except for that tweet, which has been retweeted nearly 34,000 times and liked nearly 160,000 times. Perhaps Welker’s remarkable moment of accountability journalism can set to rest all that silly talk that the media shouldn’t pay much heed to Trump’s tweets. Or maybe media organizations should check with Spicer & Co. before characterizing Trump administration initiatives to avoid overly influencing the president of the United States. Because we don’t want to mess up their messaging.

In retraction request to CNN, Trump team confirms CNN story

As President-elect Donald Trump and his people lay waste to various media-government norms and standards, they now appear intent on defanging the retraction request. The Presidential Transition Team on Tuesday issued one such document that accused CNN of the following journalistic malpractice: “On January 16, 2017, CNN broadcast a story by Manu Raju, titled ‘First on CNN: Trump’s Cabinet pick invested in company, then introduced a bill to help it,’ which omitted facts and drew conclusions in an effort to attack President-Elect Donald Trump’s designee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Tom Price.” The piece, said the retraction request, was “blatantly false.” It was not.

News organizations defend off-the-record event with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago

Reporters hung out with Donald Trump over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, though American news consumers won’t be reading too much about the event. That’s because it was all off-the-record, meaning that Trump could say anything he wanted, and the journalists who heard it all couldn’t pass along a single word.

Mike Allen, the former Politico mainstay turned correspondent for start-up Axios, tweeted some pictures from the event. Those were allowed by the authorities.

There is plenty of precedent for reporters doing off-the-record discussions with presidents, and the tradition remained strong in the Obama years. The rationale for attending is that journalists can get a window into the president’s thinking on stuff. And the rebuttal to that rationale is that the president uses the opportunity to spin reporters on his position, without any fingerprints on the transaction. It’s a way of getting the media to internalize the official view of things.

New York Times Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller said, “Our policy on off-the-record with presidents and presidents-elect is to push long and hard to do things on record.” However: “With journalists, you need some insight into the president-elect’s thinking. We have found in the past that this has helped us with Obama,” says Bumiller, arguing that the exposure has given the newspaper the “thought and direction to pursue stories afterward.”

Stephen Bannon: A media bubble destroyed the Clinton campaign

We’ve seen all manner of blame-throwing ever since Hillary Clinton, polling’s prohibitive favorite in the 2016 presidential race, tanked in key states when voters actually did their thing. Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, for instance, cited a “hostile press corps” that presumably obsessed over the candidate’s email scandal. In an interview, incoming White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon advances another view. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

McNewspapers are gobbling up small-town America

About 14 years ago, Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser — then of The Post — warned about the corporatization of journalism in “The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril.” Profit motive, they argued, runs counter to the sorts of values needed to cover government and communities. “Profits do matter at the Washington Post — they pay for the increasing costs of producing good journalism — but it is news that matters most. This attitude is shared at some other newspapers, but too few,” wrote Downie and Kaiser. In the intervening years, newspapers have shrunk to the puny extremes of a national crisis. It’s a trend that words struggle to express.

Now comes a study from the University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism highlighting the impact of chainification on local news. According to “The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts,” the last 12 years have seen a steady march of newspaper ownership among investment companies across the country. As of 2004, the report notes, the “three largest investment companies owned 352 newspapers in 27 states.” Now? The “seven largest investment companies owned [sic] 1,031 newspapers in 42 states.”