Trump bans CNN and NYT from press briefing.

This was another misstep by a poorly run administration. CNN and the New York Times aren’t going to disappear just because they’re denied access to press briefings. They’re still going to report on the Trump administration. They’ll just be relying more on other sources since they’re cut off from White House press releases. Trump’s just cut himself off from two major venues for releasing his statements.

More importantly, no politician - including Presidents - have ever won a war with the press. Trump has personal charm when he chooses to use it and he should be using it on the press corps to try to win them over. Instead he’s foolishly decided to try to bully them and that’s going to blow up in his face.

I agree with the second - I subscribed to the NYT and the Washington Post for the first time myself, a few weeks ago.
As far as the first…nah, flog Donald over everything. Every misstatement, lie, abuse of power, fraud - EVERYTHING!
There’s enough of us. Plenty of press to cover every aspect of Trump and his criminal gang, plenty of honest people to point and laugh, or scream in anger.
Bytes are cheap - I’ll keep on using them, and other methods. So will a lot of other folks.

I think after a couple of weeks, everyone here is familiar with your unabashed cheerleading for Trump and your peculiar ideas on the media. You really believe that you are getting the whole unvarnished truth on anything at all from the Trump administration, and that members of the press that the administration disagrees with should be shut out from reporting? If so, that is quite simply a ridiculous position to take.

Nevertheless, if that is your position, fair enough. You have made a number of assertions. Assertions, however, are not an argument. What you need to do now is provide some evidence that your assertions are correct. After all, you are just some mook on the Internet. What, specifically, makes any of your opinions of value to anyone else?

El_Kabong, I’m not convinced that he’s not a real-life friend of mine. This was in my Facebook feed earlier:

That was a cut-and-paste. All misspellings and grammar errors appeared in the original post.

As I’ve said before, the conservative media and the people who parrot them have this weird cognitive dissonance thing going on about voter dissatisfaction.

When white voters are angry at Democratic politicians, they’re “the American people” being unfairly slighted and disrespected by contemptuous out-of-touch elites.

But when white voters are angry at Republican politicians, they’re ignorant spoiled “unruly children” throwing tantrums because they “feel entitled to everything they want”.

Yeah, my response to him was a paraphrase of that point when you made it earlier.

Trump knows more damaging revelations will be coming out about the Russia scandal, so he wants to pre-emptively discredit the news outlets in the eyes of Republican voters.

He has to make sure that no more than a few Republican senators break ranks, otherwise he ends up in prison.

Is this really true?

The amazing thing is that he’s been compared to every bad fictional president and several real dictators and he’s the one who has been found wanting.

Can’t wait to see Melissa McCarthy’s take on this.

Someone earlier asked if there had been any walkouts or boycotts by other outlets in response. Sorry if I missed it, but The Wall Street Journal says they’ll boycott from now on if it happens again.

Regarding Trump’s attempts to demonize the journalists he doesn’t like, it takes a genius to burn those bridges in an effort to…what? Get them to stop digging and investigating? No, Trump and his team are *not *outsmarting the press here.

This is not going to end well for Trump.

Glad to hear that.

Quoted for truth. I honestly, without exaggeration, believe this to be true.

I don’t believe 45 is smart but a case can be made that it diverts the press from reporting on what he doesn’t want them to report on. Were the press even smarter, they would ignore reporting on the ban and dig deeper into his lies and things he wishes they wouldn’t report on.

Better yet, report on the ban and continue to dig, which appears to be what they’re doing. Really, why do people act as if they can’t do both?

Don’t put words in my mouth. In any event a quick scan of topical news sites reveals more hits for the ban story than the press release they were banned from.

Or won’t. Trump is the gift that just keeps on giving, like herpes.

So, in short, this is fake news. This wasn’t a briefing to the full press corps, and the organisations were not banned but not invited in the first place, and the practice of selective briefing is not new.