Obama Squelched Press Coverage of the White House. Trump Should Not Follow Suit.

Source: National Review | November 22, 2016 | Ben Shapiro

Loathing the media is no reason to restrict their access to the president.

On Monday evening, Donald Trump held a face-to-face meeting with a bevy of mainstream-media stars: Lester Holt and Chuck Todd of NBC, George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz of ABC, John Dickerson and Charlie Rose of CBS, Phil Griffin of MSNBC, and Jeff Zucker of CNN, among others. According to the New York Post, the meeting went disastrously:

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They deserve it. The media have obviously destroyed their own credibility. Polls show that nearly seven in ten Americans don’t trust the media. That lack of trust meant that even solidly researched stories about Trump were routinely ignored during the election cycle. Trump’s slamming the media isn’t out of bounds on a moral level.

With that said, we do have a problem: Who is going to actually cover the Trump presidency?

The answer: perhaps nobody. It’s quite possible that Trump will grant press access only to sycophants at Breitbart News or to friendly hosts like Sean Hannity. If turnabout is fair play, he’ll be justified in doing so — President Obama used his Department of Justice to target reporters at the Associated Press and Fox News, routinely criticized talk radio and Fox News while giving fawning exclusives to Steve Kroft of CBS News and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. The press are now complaining that Trump released only pre-screened photos of an event with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, but Obama’s White House created an entire White House media feed that furnished administration-approved photos and video designed to deliver Obama’s spin directly to the public.

Still, the state of press relations isn’t good. Conservatives should remember that we weren’t pleased when Obama did all of this. We protested constantly that Obama wouldn’t allow freedom of information, that he stonewalled at every opportunity, that his friendly media covered for him at every turn. Just because Trump is a Republican doesn’t change the math: The American people are ill-served when the executive branch isn’t answerable to the press, even if we despise the members of the press. We should be rooting for Trump to open the doors, not close them — if he’s a good president, transparency should be his friend, not his enemy. …..

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Yet few conservatives will decry Trump over his treatment of the press. That’s how badly leftists in the media have shredded their role: We no longer consider them checks on government at all, merely checks on non-leftism. The media called Republicans liars for pointing out Obama’s obvious lies about Obamacare; they portrayed Tea Partiers as terroristic nut jobs; they ignored real American concerns about Obama’s perverse foreign policy. Why should we care about their request to cover Trump now that he’s in the White House, if they couldn’t stop lying when Obama was in the White House?

And the media haven’t helped their case since Trump’s election. Instead of accurately relating the facts about Trump’s transition, his team, and his activities, they’ve turned the volume up to eleven. Trump’s transition has supposedly been historically chaotic (it hasn’t), his appointments too slow (they haven’t), his team chock-full of Nazis (nope, although questionable characters such as Steve Bannon have bragged about forwarding the ambitions of the disgusting alt-right). When Trump tweets about Hamilton, the press deem it worthy of blanket coverage. The media have numbed us; it’s nearly impossible to take them seriously.

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The best defense of a free country is a free press. That doesn’t mean an objective press — there is no such thing. But it does mean the widest possible access to information. That conservatives dislike Jeff Zucker as much as Trump does is no justification for press restrictions. It certainly doesn’t mean Americans are best served by a White House open only to bootlickers. We’ve had more than enough of that during the Obama years. Eight more years of such anti-free-press behavior and rhetoric from on high will simply expand the power of the executive at the expense of the freedom of the citizenry.

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