The journalism saw “if it bleeds, it leads” holds true for Trump and Spicer news conferences. Since viewership of the conferences aired live is low, it is the tough questions and stumbling answers that will be repeated throughout the news cycle.
The most “bloody” interchanges will last through several news cycles and even make it into Democratic TV ads.
President Obama even used this term when it was used against him:
“Absolutely,” the president responded, saying he doesn’t blame the press for embracing the old adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Obama acknowledged that it’s lot harder to make climate change or cutting infant mortality a “sexy story.” www.mediaite.com/...
The fewer objective journalists in the press conferences means that there will be more time for those remaining to ask the questions Trump or Spicer don’t want to answer.
Trump and his handlers making decisions about banning certain news media representative should do the arithmetic. It’s not rocket science, in fact it isn’t even algebra, it’s merely addition.
Consider:
On Friday afternoon, Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a press briefing with a handpicked group of reporters. All three major networks — NBC, ABC, and CBS, which was serving as the pool outlet for the day — were invited, along with Fox News. But several major news outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, Politico, and Buzzfeed, were kept out. Right-wing publications like the Washington Times and conspiracy sites like Breitbart were included. The Associated Press and Time Magazine reportedly boycotted the gaggle in response. thinkprogress.org/...
If the Associated Press continues to boycott press conferences this is highly significant. I don’t know if it’s possible to rank the readership of their stories since they are published in newspapers across the country and their articles and reporters are featured on numerous news TV shows.
This data is 10 years old, but there’s no reason to think the numbers have significantly changed:
As of 2007, news collected by the AP was published and republished by more than 1,700 newspapers, in addition to more than 5,000 television and radio broadcasters. The photograph library of the AP consists of over 10 million images. The AP operates 243 news bureaus in 120 countries. It also operates the AP Radio Network, which provides newscasts twice hourly for broadcast and satellite radio and television stations. Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. The AP employs the "inverted pyramid" formula for writing that enables the news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essentials.
The AP's multi-topic structure has resulted in web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN posting its articles, often relying on AP as their first source for news coverage of breaking news items. This and the constant updating evolving stories require has had a major impact on the AP's public image and role, giving new credence to the AP's ongoing mission of having staff for covering every area of news fully and promptly. The AP is also the news service used on the Wii's News Channel.[6] In 2007, Google announced that it was paying to receive Associated Press content, to be displayed in Google News,
en.wikipedia.org/...
This is a list of the most popular websites in the United States the top news website (after non-news sites like YouTube) from Alexa.
18 CNN
26 New York Times
32 Breitbart
41 Washington Post
45 Huffington Post
47 Fox News
from www.alexa.com/…
Of course Fox News television is the majorTV news source for Trump supporters.
These aren’t fake polls! Alexa is the gold standard for website traffic rating.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Breitbart’s reporter started asking tough questions. Likewise, it would be amazing to see what would happen if Rupert Murdoch unleashed his reporters to do real journalism. (I wrote about that here.)