(Now That’s What I Call Music Presents: “Donald Trump’s Greatest Press Fights Vol. 1!”)
The White House on Monday blocked POLITICO from boarding Air Force One and carrying out its print pool duties, marking the latest escalation in an ongoing battle over media outlets’ access to President Donald Trump.
“The White House has blocked today’s print pooler, Politico, from traveling on Air Force One,” Washington Post reporter Katherine Doyle wrote in a White House pool report Monday afternoon.
Doyle added that “since [the White House] was unable to find a replacement, there is no primary print pooler on this trip,” and noted that she would be making reports as “the secondary pooler” as Trump travels to Nebraska for a campaign rally ahead of the midterms.
In less than a month, the president has barred multiple high-end media outlets from the White House as well, arguing they write too many bad stories to be allowed near him:
In a post on Truth Social, Trump accused the three outlets of repeatedly publishing “FAKE NEWS” and warned that other news organizations could face similar restrictions.
“Effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW… and Politico… from the White House as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Trump wrote. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America.”
This also isn’t a new thing, as he’s had reporters removed from events, asked his supporters to do some nasty things to journalists and more. His hatred of the media has a Wikipedia page that’s about as long as the one for Sydney Sweeney.
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: First and foremost, the First Amendment issues here are obvious and staggering, so let’s skip past those and look at other things that might be somewhat oblique but just as important:
Your administrators are watching: Any media scholars worth their salt have seen the Albert Bandura studies with the kids and the Bobo dolls. If you haven’t, the gist of this is that Bandura had kids watch a TV program of a kid their age using a bat or stick to smack around a Bobo doll. Then, he put them in a room with a stick and a Bobo doll to see what they’d do. They grabbed the stick and started whacking the heck out of this thing. (There were a lot more studies and there is a lot more nuance to this, but you get the idea.)
When Trump pulls out his stick and starts whacking the Bobo doll that is the media, other people tend to think it’s a good idea as well. I can’t make a causal connection, but I can say I never saw this T-shirt before Trump started declaring journalists the enemy of the people:
Also, when the courts are the only recourse to reverse such things, only people who have the resources to access the courts can do so.
Administrators at high schools and colleges who aren’t all that keen on the work of their student journalists aren’t ignorant of the current climate regarding the media, so it’s not a stretch to think that the more the media can take a beating, the more willing people will be to give media folks one.
We’ve already covered a lot of those kinds of situations here on the blog, so the vibe is already out there in terms of administrators taking a stick to the student media. People tend to do as much as they can get away with, so knowing that one branch of government is trying to get away with this should be a concerning precedent.
When media become the story, the media become distracted: I’m never going to say that the First Amendment isn’t a core value of our society and our right to free expression. I will say, however, that the media folks who avail themselves of this amendment tend to become exceptionally myopic when their rights (or those of fellow media people) are violated.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone, in that when I see a student media outlet getting its rights trampled, I basically hit the Bat Signal on the blog and write about nothing but that for at least a few days. I’d argue that my focus is really student media and student-media related items, so at least I’m still in ballpark on this. However, I could be doing posts on how to make better leads, do better interviews or get a job instead of railing against the stupidity of some pea-brained administrator who thinks they are above the law.
When CNN or MSNow or whatever else gets drilled like this, it’s a lot bigger Bat Signal and so everyone is paying attention to that. Even more, the folks who are paying attention have a much wider range of things they SHOULD be paying attention to. Trump could be in the process of nuking Rhode Island because someone forgot to tell him there was a silent “h” in there, and we’d all be doing think pieces about the founders’ intentions regarding free expression.
In short, none of us wants to be the story, but when we are, it’s better to keep our eye on the ball than on our own egos.
