Donald Trump taught the lessons that Trump has been teaching to the Republican Party during his presidency.
That lesson is simple: Don’t play by the media’s rules and don’t try to win their approval. It’s not a game you’ll ever win, and Trump managed to have a largely successful presidency (in terms of many of its policies) being unencumbered by the whims of the media as other presidents have been in the past.
Many of the reasons we don’t understand are why some Republican politicians try to make their policies and statements around what they think the media will want to hear or talk about. There are still many Republicans that believe the use of the media to spread their message is essential, as well as that they have access to the media.
But doing so on the media’s terms is never the unbiased situation it’s supposed to be. Journalists have become increasingly hostile to Republicans, joining in Democrats’ talking point of the GOP going all-in on extremism, continuing to push Republicans as supporters of insurrection, etc. There’s no trying to win with the media because they are not an unbiased, objective industry. The media are nine out of ten complicit and sometimes even creators of the Democratic narrative.
We saw several reports this week about Republicans closing down the media. This started as a small piece. New York Magazine on Monday, with a Republican adviser straight-up saying they don’t see the point.
“I just don’t even see what the point is anymore,” said an adviser to one likely GOP presidential aspirant, who requested anonymity to discuss press strategy. “We know reporters always disagreed with the Republican Party, but it used to be you thought you could get a fair shake. Now every reporter, and every outlet, is just chasing resistance rage-clicks.”
The problem with this piece, however, is that the writer proves the adviser’s point The next paragraph.
Another theory is that Republicans really don’t have much to say. The past six years have seen them rally behind a person almost all of them once denounced as dangerously unfit for public office — even as their most dire 2015-era warnings proved true. Any good profile writer should ask what the Trump administration saw that changed their minds. In the case of Cruz, what explains the flip from describing Trump as an immoral bully to writing a glowing profile of him for the Time “100” issue? My decision was changed because I wanted to win the reelection election and be a powerful politician. is typically not a satisfactory answer.
It Washington Post Vanity FairThe GOP closing down of the press room on Tuesday also led to lamentations from the audience. The Post:
“We in the state of Florida are not going to allow legacy media outlets to be involved in our primaries,” DeSantis reportedly told the crowd of more than a thousand conservatives, who had paid at least $100 to attend the summit. “I’m not going to have a bunch of left-wing media people asking our candidates gotcha questions.”
The remarks were further reaffirmed by the campaign’s spokeswoman. with a tweet aimed at “fake news journalists” — a picture of DeSantis onstage.
“How’s the view from outside security?” she asked.
Campaign committed to doing the right thing. Questions about who selected the credentialed outlets or whether any were recording debates went unanswered. Reporters who were kept outside wrote stories anyway, cadging recordings of the conference and talking to attendees and candidates.
By the way, is it any wonder Ron DeSantis wouldn’t let major media outlets in? 60 minutesIt is still sticking by the horrible hit on DeSantis that it did last year and very few outlets have taken responsibility for it. However, most outlets tried to make fun of him. There’s no difference between letting in the media and letting in Charlie Crist.
But here’s what the rest of it is. Vanity Fair:
Trump shattered precedent during the 2016 election cycle through his campaign’s media blacklist, with numerous outlets, including the Washington PostBuzzFeed and Politico refused to grant press credentials for Trump’s public events. Trump, who complained about the presidential debate process during both his campaigns, refused to participate in one in 2020. This 2022 midterms cycle, GOP primary candidates in battleground states have clamped down on media access and increasingly avoided debates—forums traditionally moderated by the media. “Over a half dozen GOP candidates in crucial state and federal races have either skipped out on or not committed to primary debates,” ABC News reported back in April, noting that there are “ripple effects” of candidates opting out of debating.
[…]
The future of presidential debates also remains to be seen, as the Republican National Committee in April “voted unanimously” to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan organization that has organized that has hosted the debates for more than three decades. The move came after the RNC accused the commission, which includes Republican and Democratic co-chairs, of being biased, echoing attacks Trump repeatedly leveled on the group. “Debates are an important part of the democratic process,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement at the time, vowing that the party was “going to find newer, better debate platforms” without specifying what those would be.
It is perfectly acceptable. The idea of blocking media outlets from debates and speeches is bad. However, in normal circumstances media shouldn’t be acting as activists against the other. Some journalists at “blacklisted” operations are good journalists, and it sucks to see them lumped in with the organization as a whole, but the management at those outlets have let their reporters, anchors, and others get away with activism instead of journalism for far too long. It is important that they are reminded of their jobs and the consequences for violating them as journalists.
Not that it’s a lesson they’ll learn. In fact, a column at POLITICO does little more than threaten the GOP if they don’t open up to the press again.
- If a politician prohibits press freedom, there is no other way for the press to uncover a story. It is as simple as that. New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe recently noted, he’s an advocate of the “writearound,” in which a reporter, when denied access to his subject, mines oral histories, letters, memoirs, emails, court testimony and previous interviews for material, and talks to the subject familiars.
[…]
- A candidate can maintain a cone of silence, but he can’t stop the flow of information. As Weigel wrote, reporters can interview the attendees from the events they’ve been excluded from or listen to recordings of events.
- Telling a story is a sugar rush. New York Times Recognize reporter who is lost. When I feel down, I dial a Times reporter just to tell him I won’t talk to him. However, the candidate also appears weak by going silent. They make it part of their story. This gives opponents of the taciturn Republicans a chance to strike a blow. “My opponent is too chicken to face the New York Times. How well is he going to do with Vladimir Putin?”
There are more points in there, but look at what the writer is saying: We can do our jobs without you speaking to us, and we will continue digging for stuff you don’t want us to ask you about. Without speaking to Republicans, they can continue writing the same rubbish as before.
The official GOP response to this column should be “Don’t threaten us with a good time.”
If you don’t let us into your press events, we’ll give you bad coverageIt’s a brilliant response to the GOP closing down the media due to their routinely poor and dishonest coverage. It’s almost like they actually want to be shut out so that it gives them license to really embrace their resistance literotica.
There is no reason Republicans should read any of these headlines and worry that they’re making a mistake. It has been difficult for the media to be objective during Trump’s and post-Trump times (not even if they had done it before). You shouldn’t reward them with easy access to important events. They should be made to work harder.
About Post Author
