![]() It’s a question that would have carried more weight if CNN hadn’t spent hours covering that ginned-up controversy, though with less zeal than the Washington Post or the New York Times. It was about the “caravan” and why Trump had used it to demonize immigrants before the election. Lost in the furor over Acosta’s brief ban was his actual question. To Trump, Jim Acosta is just another Omarosa, the convenient foil who riles up the loyal viewers and adds some conflict. If Trump really is our first reality-show president, then the media is one of The Trump Show ‘s most reliable characters, a recurring villain from season to season. It confirmed, among other things, just how much he feeds off of us. Reading all 17,000 words of the transcript of Trump’s post-election press conference was a depressing exercise. Yes, we’ve gotten better about calling out his lies and debunking his nonsense in real time. More stories, more fact-checks, more panel discussions, more BREAKING NEWS push alerts. More investigative firepower directed at Trump’s fraud-riddled past. More journalists assigned to the White House beat. Yet we, in the media, still haven’t figured him out.ĭespite being the furthest thing from a normal president - with his Twitter rants and his flouting of the Constitution, his flirting with white nationalists and declaring journalists the “enemy of the people” - we cover him mostly in the same way we did back in June 2015, when he first descended that escalator and declared his intention to run for president, or when he swore an oath and became president on January 20th, 2017. When it comes to dealing with journalists, courting and cajoling, flattering and outright lying to them, he’s been at this game for nearly half a century. After all, the guy was born, raised and cut his teeth in the heyday of the New York media wars. But he knows what makes the media run, what drives ratings and what gets clicks. He may be one of the most ill-suited, unprepared and temperamentally unfit individuals to ever serve as president. By one count, he received $5.6 billion of it during the 2016 campaign - more than the combined spending of every other candidate who ran for president that year. If the past two-and-a-half years have taught us anything, it’s that Trump is a master of earned media. ![]() ![]() It’s when major TV networks, newspapers, magazines and other outlets cover you instead of you paying them to get your message out. “Earned media” is a fancy way of saying free publicity. THE PRESIDENT: It’s called “earned media.” It’s worth billions. President, first off, I personally think it’s very good to have you here because a free press and this type of engagement. Here it is, verbatim, taken from the 17,000-word transcript of the press conference: ![]() Future historians should study this moment as they make sense of the Trump years. There was another moment from that Trumpian spectacle that was just as revealing and damning as the Acosta press-pass scandal, one that was soon swept under the wave of the next news cycle. ![]() WASHINGTON - If the Jim-Acosta-as-First-Amendment-hero subplot is the only thing we remember about President Trump’s uniquely bizarre, incoherent and at times surreal post-midterm-election press conference, well, that’s a shame. But he says somebody had a horse face - all day we hear about that. All day on TV - and I don’t even watch TV, except sports. “May I say something you’re not going to like? I think the press loves him. ![]()
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