The media covering Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was blatantly manipulated on Friday. Even John King of CNN thinks so.
The Donald must be laughing hard, right?
Told by his staff that there’d be a press conference on at 10 AM during which Trump would address whether he believes President Barack Obama was born in the United States—for the last five years Trump has repeatedly said he wasn't— the media turned out in force and waited. It waited while Trump promoted his new hotel where the event was held and while he was endorsed by a stage-full of retired-military officers and Medal of Honor winners.
And then he took exactly 33 seconds to again lie about Hillary Clinton, which he embedded in another lie.
"Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy," Trump said. "I finished it. I finished it. You know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period. Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again."
And then he walked off the stage, leaving reporters to shout questions at his back.
Let’s start with the obvious: Clinton did not start the birther movement and Trump did not end anything. He flip-flopped, like so many other politicians, and he’ll probably do it again before the election is over. And on this subject. He could have simply apologized, but rather he made it seem like he was on board all along and he was simply saying, “Enough with it; let’s move on.”
But no one’s going to move on, least of all the press, which was steaming by the end, even more later when reporters and producers—but not video cameras or photographers—were barred from a pool tour of the hotel.
A media pool is used when there is a crowd of reporters covering an event but only a limited amount of space—like a tour of a new hotel. Typically a reporter, television producer, audio reporter, still photographer and broadcast camera go on the tour and share all the footage and quotes they get.
But not on Friday.
Think about that. Someone from Trump’s campaign puts hands on a producer to prevent him or her from doing their job, from being close enough to the GOP presidential nominee so they could ask questions. That’s how bad Trump wants to control the message.
But this time he may have gone too far.
In a show of joint defiance, the major television networks collectively voted to pull a camera and erase video of Donald Trump giving a tour of his hotel, a protest of the campaign preventing any editorial presence on the tour.
Erasing a tape they probably wouldn’t have ever used may not seem like much, but journalists try very hard not to bite the hand that provides access to the nominee. Next time, though, maybe they’ll erase all the irrelevant parts of the press conference.