We’re coming up for an interesting showdown starting on Monday. Monday is the day that CNN drew in the press pool to cover the White House briefing. However, CNN has just been banned, along with MSNOW and Politico. So will they continue with the press pool as planned — particularly since these bannings happened while Susie Wiles was out of town and nobody has informed the other four networks officially that CNN will not be doing the pool?
Trump’s actions here are to drive these outlets out of business and maybe he’ll do just that. CNN, MSNOW, and Politico do first tier reporting, meaning that they get it on the street and on the spot. They’re not second tier outlets like we are, where we watch for reliable sources to break a story and then we send it on to you, confident that our source knows the truth and that it’s safe to bring it to you.
It will be interesting indeed to see what these outlets do without boots on the ground reporting. I wish them well. It’s hard enough to get anything out of Trump on the rare occasions that he’s awake because he’s too busy yelling at female reporters and berating the press in general.
It will be interesting to see if there are any legal challenges to what Trump has done. Does the First Amendment allow a resentful president to cherry pick who is allowed to come in for a briefing?
And what about the foreign press? They report things truthfully to their readers. So what will become of The Guardian, The Independent, The Toronto Star, Der Spiegel, Haaretz, and other first class outlets of that ilk? For that matter, what happens to the Mirror and the Irish Star, the tabloids? Are they going to be banned as well, since they tend to be anti-Trump and go for the sensational stories coming out of the White House?
This will be an interesting week to observe. Where will CNN and MSNOW get their data? My best bet is that they’ll do like Politico, they’ll use sources that they’ve developed over the years within Washington. Politico may well survive without the White House briefings because Politico has all kinds of developed sources. Whether the same is true of MSNOW or CNN is something that we may just now come to learn.
Interesting that Trump feels comfortable pulling this kind of a stunt just before the midterms, isn’t it? Susie, time to get back on the job and do damage control, stat.
