Trump is playing with the press: Glenn Reynolds

[SVPete]

Trump is playing with the press: Glenn Reynolds

... Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores ...).

Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.

They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control. ...
...
The killer counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging. The counter-move is to bolster its own trustworthiness by acting (and being) more neutral and sober, and by being more trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work ...

I don't think DJT lies awake at night worrying that the MSM will magically become non-partisan and careful to verify the accuracy and completeness of what they report.

On a more abstract plane, what the Framers hoped for in writing the Freedom of the Press clause in the 1st Amendment was that a press with a wide range of ideas and views would have the net effect of being a constraint on politicians' inclination to abuse their power (if they didn't already have personal integrity). Unfortunately, what the Framers thought unlikely, a press with a single dominant worldview has come to pass. So we have a situation, now, where the press no longer holds all pols feet to the fire honestly, and all the public has to try to hold the feet of the press to the fire is similarly partisan, selective, and dubious pols.

[thundley4]

Almost the entirety of the MSM is leftist.  That is why they want Trump to stop tweeting.  As long as he tweets, his own view is going out to the people, good or bad.

The MSM can try and twist his words in their reporting, but his own words are there for people to see and make up their own minds about.

[SVPete]

Almost the entirety of the MSM is leftist.  That is why they want Trump to stop tweeting.  As long as he tweets, his own view is going out to the people, good or bad.

The MSM can try and twist his words in their reporting, but his own words are there for people to see and make up their own minds about.

The MSM hate being bypassed. Over a year ago I compared a number of "outrageous" things MSM folk claimed Trump had said, and noticed a pattern. What they claimed and what Trump said were significantly different. I realized then that absolutely nothing the MSM reported about Trump could be believed without verification.

[J P Sousa]

Trump is playing with the press   

AND his political opposition. Both (imo) will take things to such an absurd level that their buffoonery will become just comic relief for a majority of the public. 

[SVPete]

AND his political opposition. Both (imo) will take things to such an absurd level that their buffoonery will become just comic relief for a majority of the public. 

As Glenn Reynolds often say (quoting a friend), just think of MSM "reporters" as Democrat operativeswith press credentials.