Robert Reich is becoming my favorite person to rebut. In his piece, “Robert Reich: Donald Trump’s plan to neuter the White House press corps could neuter our democracy”, Reich lays out a progressive list of rehash whining without addressing his own central point. Here is a guide to what he is saying:
Reading the magnificent claim in the title, one would expect a cause and effect rendering about how press freedom equals the open flow of information that informs a free and democratic society. Reich is a learned man after-all. Funny how he doesn’t mention Obama’s stiff arming of the media, his unprecedented drought of press conferences and his historic denials of FOIA requests.
Reich is pining for the good ol days when the exclusive club of traditional big media ruled the national conversation. Then the Internet happened. And blogs. Reich seems to be unaware of that. Dear Robert, more people get there news off the internet than the old biggies. Its actually worse than that. Facebook is now the largest news provider. At least Trump isn’t inviting the FaceBook-iverse into the press meetings. The point is, the media is much larger and more diverse than it ever was back when. It’s easy to pout and write off all bloggers as incompetent blubberers that shouldn’t be allowed in with the grownups, but then Robert should know, he’s one of them now. That line of thinking also grants too much gravitas to big media, like CNN for example. If you’re going to have fake, news, at least it should be big media fake news, right?
There are charges and fears in the article that Trump will staff the ranks of the press with alt-right bloggers. I guess Robert didn’t get the memo that even the big media has been schooled by their own editors that ‘alt-right’ is way overly broad and thus too inaccurate to responsibly define any specific Trump constituency. It was originally coined to describe a tiny conference of several hundred ambiguous neo-Nazis that held a conference in DC earlier last year. Than the big media went wild with the term. Yes, the same big media that should be the only rightful august distinguished guests at Whitehouse press briefings.
Reich goes on to whine about reporters work stations, babble about Russian hacking that has nothing to do with his thesis and recount stories from the campaign as though they were relevant.
While there is a chance that Trump will screw this up and invite an over-large rabble into the press briefings, his statements through his staff notes nothing of the kind. Media IS bigger than big media, much bigger. It’s time to reflect that in the White House briefings. I can understand why the all the three letter media would be upset about this, as yes, it is a net dilution of traditional power, but they’ll get over it. Go shed a tear into your single-malt scotch and pull up your underpants. Competition only makes you stronger.
