Donald Trump has a routine for playing the media. He heads out to the South Lawn of the White House and stands in front of Marine One and takes reporters’ questions over the sound of the helicopter. As reporters shout and plead for attention, he ignores the questions he doesn’t want to answer and he rarely takes follow-ups. This way, Trump gets out the headlines he wants with zero accountability or pressure to go beyond the lies. Reporters complain about it, but they’re not doing anything to push back.
“If he was at a podium, we would be pressing him after he answers the question, we would be correcting him, we would be pointing out discrepancies in previous answers, and we’re not able to do that in the chaotic setting of a departure,” CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang told Politico. “Many times I’ve tried to ask a follow-up question, but he’s already pointed to somebody else.”
”They are actually a perfect encapsulation of him: quick hit questions, quick hit answers, lots of give and take,” another White House reporter said. “But they are terrible for reporters. It is impossible to hear, have a substantive dialogue, ask a follow-up question or do any serious pressing of the president. It is a fucking circus.”
So guys, a suggestion: Don’t do it. Don’t be the monkeys in Trump’s fucking circus. Let him talk to Fox News and Sinclair and OANN and Newsmax and, I don’t know, The Epoch Times—the places that are going to report exactly what he wants all the time anyway. Meanwhile the news organizations that have at least some minor commitment to doing something other than stenography can boycott the circus, save their reporters the indignity of fighting for position and screaming out questions that they know will get false answers anyway, with no opportunity to follow up. The American public is not better informed or better off because Trump screamed something anti-Semitic over the noise of a helicopter. Why pretend that this is meaningful journalism? Better to put those resources to doing actual investigative reporting into what really is going on behind the scenes in this administration.
