Tag Archives: responsibilities

Does Trump Want a War with the Press?

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That’s the thrust of a Howard Kurtz piece on FoxNews Monday morning.  Then he asked

[D]oes Trump want both sides on a permanently hostile footing?

Kurtz needs to come out of his press bubble and poke around in the world some.  The press has been hostile to anything non-Left for years.  The press has been openly hostile and deliberately biased against President-Elect Donald Trump ever since Trump announced his candidacy.

Kurtz has even acknowledged the press’ war against Trump—and this is post-election.

Donald Trump, they say, should not be normalized.

There is, also, this bit of Kurtz’ own disingenuousity:

Trump has shown he has numerous ways to circumvent the media. He hasn’t held a news conference since July (after all those months of castigating Hillary Clinton for avoiding such encounters).

What’s the purpose of a news conference, though?  During all that time since July, Hillary Clinton not only wasn’t talking to the press, she wasn’t talking to the American people, either, except through a very occasional rally or the debates.  Trump, while not talking to the press, held innumerable rallies—with people numbering in the thousands attending—and was very active on social media.  In all of this, Trump was talking directly to the citizens of the United States.  Even in the frequent interviews he had with individual…journalists…he wasn’t so much talking to the interviewer as he was talking to the viewers of and listeners to the interviews; he was talking to us Americans.

Us voters have said in so many ballots that we no longer want, no longer need, no longer are interested in the press filtering (or censoring) our communications with those we’re considering representing us in government, and Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t need the press to hold up his end of those communications.  Of course Kurtz knows all of this.

Plainly, it’s not that Trump wants a war with the press.  It’s that the press demands war with Trump.

It Wasn’t Political

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Recall that the Hampshire College President, Jonathan Lash, pulled the US flag down from all campus flagpoles, along with “all other flags.”  Recall further that he took this action after he

had lowered the US flag to half-staff after Election Day[]

followed by the US flag being burned on Veterans Day.

Lash, though, as he finally was forced by the public’s hue and cry to restore our nation’s flag to its proper place atop flagpoles, is still denying that he did it for politics.

We did not lower the flag to make a political statement. … We acted solely to facilitate much-needed dialogue on our campus about how to dismantle the bigotry that is prevalent in our society.

As an aside, what you mean “we,” Paleface?  You’re the President; it was done at your order. Full stop.

More importantly, how are lowering the flag to half-staff and then taking it down altogether under the circumstances in which you ordered these things done not political statements?  Anything done with the flag beyond its normal handling is political.

And then: Lash thoroughly contradicted himself within his own statement: the free speech that is the “dialog” engendered by his actions is at the center of what is political.

The Law Professor Misapprehends

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Jacob Gershman has a piece in The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog about the increasing use of software algorithms to assess newsworthiness and the implications of that increasing use on legal assessments of the tradeoffs between individual privacy and what’s fit to print.  In it, Gershman quotes Georgetown University Associate Professor of Legal Research and Writing Erin Carroll.

Given the dominance of platforms like Facebook, the related influence of algorithms on how news is made, and specifically how algorithms are beginning to supplant editorial discretion and the editorial process, courts need to rethink their rationales for deference to the press. In the realm of privacy law, courts have long trusted the Fourth Estate to vet the newsworthiness of a subject before publishing, so that the courts themselves did not have to. Today, that trust is becoming misplaced.

Carroll is right that courts need to “rethink their rationales for deference to the press,” but for reasons wholly independent of the existence of news algorithms.  On the contrary, Carroll has a couple of misapprehensions here.  For one, editors (and publishers, come to that) certainly are outsourcing the work of assessments in making editorial decisions, but they cannot outsource their own responsibilities in the newsworthy judging process.

For another, related thing, there’s no reason to believe the courts’ trust “is becoming misplaced” due to the use of news algorithms.

In both instances, Carroll has missed the key factor: it’s entirely the editors’ and publishers’ decisions to use new algorithms, and it’s entirely the editors’ and publishers’ decisions to use any part of the algorithms’ outputs.  The editors and publishers remain entirely and solely responsible for the material they publish—whether that material originates from interns, news algorithms, or journalists.

Full stop.

Update: Missing word is no longer missing.

Why Trump Needs To Stop Ditching The Press Pool

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At least that’s what Juan Williams thinks in his Fox News piece last Thursday.  He’s far from the only pressman who thinks so, too.

It seems that President-elect Donald Trump was rude enough to want to have dinner out with a few folks without the madding crowd of papparazi and other reporters hanging over their shoulders.  So he and his group evaded the press pool that was following him around.

“THERE’S GUNFIRE—WE’RE MOVING THE PRESIDENT.”

I heard those scary words from a Secret Service agent on October 23, 1983. I was covering President Reagan for The Washington Post and happened to be near the tiny group of journalists—the so-called “presidential press pool,” as he attended the Master’s golf tournament.

Then, as the president was leaving the Augusta National Golf Club the news broke that 241 American servicemen had been killed when terrorists bombed the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.

Those were chaotic moments.

Those were the chaotic paragraphs with which Williams opened his screed over Trump’s presuming to decline to not cater to the self-important press.  This sort of thing is an outlier, too, and unlikely to be missed just because a President wants a (relatively) quiet dinner on the town.

Similarly, Trump did not take a press pool with him when he went to the White House last week for his first sit-down with President Obama. He did not have reporters on the plane he used during the campaign.

How rude!  He didn’t bring a gaggle with him to a business meeting.  Cluck, cluck.

These pressmen choose not to consider factors involved in Trump’s decision to ditch the press so he and his family could enjoy a steak dinner, to take one of these plaints.  Personal, individual decisions (which don’t matter to the NLMSM, since they don’t see Americans as individuals, they only see us as either cookie cutter, interchangeable, correct consumers of their stuff or as cookie cutter, interchangeable racists and homophobes who disagree with them), like other folks wanting to go to a restaurant to enjoy a steak dinner.

Now, when a President wants to go anywhere—a steakhouse, let’s say—he unavoidably must be accompanied by his Secret Service protection detail.  These additional six men and women (to pick a number for discussion’s sake) are going to take up space in that restaurant, but that’s unavoidable, and these men and women know how to be discrete and unobtrusive—that’s part of their protection job.

But the press?  They’re crowding around asking questions—loudly, so as to be heard above their fellows—pushing microphones and cameras aggressively, so as to get the audio and the video.  It’s their job to be heard and to be as disruptive as necessary in order to get their question(s) to be the one the President answers.  They’ll even try to get “reaction” shots and questions asked of the other patrons in that restaurant.  And that’s enormously disruptive, to the restaurant, to those other diners trying to enjoy their steak dinners, even to the passersby on the sidewalk outside.

Do the pressmen care?  Not a bit.  These self-important ones care only about their stories and their bylines.

Don’t ditch the press all the time, Mr President.  But unhesitatingly ditch them on occasion when you want to be out and about and don’t want to interfere with the doings of others who also want to be out and about and happen to be near you at the time.

How Democrats View Civility

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A group of maverick history teachers at elite Beacon HS in Manhattan let their kids skip class Tuesday to join a Trump Tower protest, despite objections from colleagues, The Post has learned.

Roughly 200 kids from the Hell’s Kitchen public school were granted hooky passes at 11 a.m. and joined students from across the city to disparage The Donald, sources said.

This is reminiscent of the teachers unions in Wisconsin and of the Wisconsin and Indiana Democratic Parties during their wars on the States’ governments over worker rights not to pay money to unions to which they didn’t belong.  In those cases, the Wisconsin unions encouraged their teachers to lie about where they were as they missed work (with too many doctors complicit in the lies) to “protest” the State government’s legislation to rein in public unions and the Democrats in both States giving themselves permission to abscond from the States, shirking their duties, and halting those two governments because these minority parties didn’t get their way.

So now precious teachers are teaching precious little ones to emulate precious Democrats and these teachers’ unions.

The schools employing these teachers are receiving tons of State dollars under a broad range of programs and grants.  It’s time to review those programs and grants.