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Robert's avatar

Spot on. I remember reading “leaks” from anonymous WH Reporters calling Jim Acosta a showboat, etc. It used to anger me because he seemed like the only one not cowering to Trump’s BS.

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Theodora30's avatar

I think it is a mistake to understand this issue as just something Trump has done because that implies it will end with him. For decades the right has successfully manipulated the media with both bullying and seduction. The Bush administration were geniuses at this. From an article in the Nation about Bush’s successful war on the media:

“ Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this war against the media has been the fact that members of the media have largely behaved as if it is just business as usual. In fact, much of the success of the effort derives from the cooperation, both implicit and explicit, of the press. No one, after all, forces local TV stations to run official propaganda videos in lieu of their own programming, or without identifying them as such, and no one forces CNN Newsource, among others, to distribute them.”

Remember how they planted the right wing operative Jeff Gannon in the press pool so Scott McClellan could turn to him to avoid uncomfortable questions? When it was revealed that Gannon was really Jeff Guckert, a male prostitute and right wing plant bloggers who uncovered the story and journalists who reported it were trashed by the WaPo’s media critic Howard Kurtz for investigating his private life. The National Press Club even invited Gannon to be an honored guest on a panel on blogging and journalistic credibility.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bushs-war-press/

I will never forget watching Donald Rumsfeld’s disdainful treatments of journalists in this press conferences and their fawning treatment of him in return.

And while the Bush adminstration had media manipulation down to a science, Republicans had been bullying the press since Nixon. I am old enough to remember Spiro Agnew’s vicious attacks on the media, most penned by Pat Buchanan who is still on PBS McLaughlin Report.

This 2019 DesMoines Register article compares the treatment of the media by Trump and by Agnew. In a speech in DesMoines in 1969 Agnew accused the media of deciding in advance to oppose Nixon’s Vietnam War strategy, of being controlled by an East Coast elite that did not represent the views of the American people, etc. The Des Moines speech was not just the a spontaneous reaction to negative media coverage:

“It was calculated to, in Buchanan’s words, “terrify the networks” and to “discredit their reporting in the minds of millions.” Letters to the Register show the speech hit its mark. “Bravo for Mr. Agnew,” wrote a Bettendorf man, for example. “Far too long” the networks had reported “according to their whims and wishes.” The Nixon White House was delighted; the GOP had manufactured an effective, new weapon for its political arsenal.”

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2019/11/10/fifty-years-ago-spiro-agnew-and-des-moines-speech/4166207002/

If the entire Trump family is swept up by an alien spaceship tomorrow this problem will not go with them.

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