I forgot to publish this…
So about this compromising information that Russian intelligence has on Trump. My understanding is that Buzzfeed published the compromising info without any shred of corroboration or source-checking, like you’d expect from Buzzfeed, a place with zero journalistic credibility.
Then CNN published a fully fact- and source-checked story that there was potentially-compromising intelligence information being passed around, but leaving out the specifics because they could not corroborate it, like you’d expect from journalists with credibility.
Today Trump held a press conference (11 Jan), first one in forever. Now I haven’t watched it or heard it, I only saw the live Twitter commentary and the fallout and maybe a sound bite or two.
Apparently he was openly hostile to a CNN reporter there. The CNN reporter was allegedly threatened to shut up or he’d be kicked out.
Cue the outrage.
Well I’m just going to say it: I don’t have much faith in the White House press corp. I think they are a lot more concerned with their White House access than they are with journalistic integrity, and I’ve had this opinion going back to the Bush administration. How can I tell? That CNN reporter chose to shut up. No points for journalism awarded. If CNN really wants to speak truth to power, they should get thrown out of the press conference for all the world to see. Don’t sneak around afterward saying, “They were mean to me.”
Still, I trust CNN a lot more than I trust Buzzfeed.
Personally, I don’t think White House access is necessary to a functioning democracy. In fact it might be harmful. I mean, White House reporters simply repeat what the president tells them. That seems like it’s more of an advantage for the president than the people of the U.S.
Back to the Russia thing. We all want to believe Trump has been caught red-handed colluding with Russia because … why exactly? We think he’s going to step down? We think we’ll get a “do-over” for the election? We think he’ll be impeached and everything will go back to normal?
We all still remember that Mike Pence will become president if Trump leaves office, right? I mean, it’s not like Trump gets impeached and then Obama goes back into the office, or Clinton comes out of hiding. It’ll be Mike Pence, the guy who is demonstrably worse for the left, policy-wise, than Trump.
Also, if Pence is president, he’s got a pretty good chance of getting re-elected, because he’s likable. If Trump is president, there’s less chance of him being re-elected. (Depending on who the Democrats decide to run, that is.)
I’ve joked on Twitter that because of Trump, Twitter currently presents a clear and present danger to the nation, and somebody should raid their offices and destroy their servers and take the entire service offline.
I’m not entirely joking about that, actually.
P. S. I saw this open letter to Trump from the US press corps. Sounds like exactly what I want to hear, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Mainly because it was actually an open letter from one guy in the press corps. And, well, that guy isn’t on the list of people in the press corps, according to Wikipedia. Nor is his organization the CJR, which is actually a media watchdog group. So it’s basically a “wish list” of how the CJR wants the press corps to behave, not necessarily how they will behave.
