Michael Boyle's weblog
So this is interesting:
GOP consultant who was once asked to head up communications for now-President Donald Trump tweeted out a laundry list of suggestions to the media Saturday morning on how to best push back at a White House administration that continues to threaten them.
According to writer and media consultant Cheri Jacobus, “The days of pretending” what is happening under Trump isn’t “serious” is over and it is time for a concerted push-back.
A very interesting summary of what’s been going on behind the scenes in the new Trump White House.
This account of Trump’s tumultuous first days in office comes from interviews with nearly a dozen senior White House officials and other Trump advisers and confidants, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations and moments.
Source: The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot – The Washington Post
[Spicer] said: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe.”
This, along with much else Spicer said, was plainly untrue. But there’s a strategy at work here. The Trump administration is creating a baseline expectation among its loyalists that they can’t trust anything said by the media. The spat over crowd size is a low-stakes, semi-comic dispute, but the groundwork is being laid for much more consequential debates over what is, and isn’t, true.
Source: Trump’s real war isn’t with the media. It’s with facts. – Vox
The Trump Administration is trying to spin the sparse turnout using classic “Big Lie” techniques. Ezra takes a deeper look, complete with links to reliable data sources and further analysis.
If anyone’s wondering why people turn to comedians for their news and editorial commentary, watch Russell Brand take the “Morning Joe” crew to the woodshed. Skip ahead to around the 4 min mark if you’re in a rush.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADJhErmJuoQ]
This morning Wired’s Epicenter blog is running an interesting piece: Five Things Google Could Do For Newspapers. There’s some pretty interesting stuff in there, but my fear is that all of the suggestions are merely handwaving unless papers deal with the real problem – they don’t actually print enough real news. Newspapers made bets in the 90s and into the 00s that served (essentially) to divest themselves of the business of publishing the news, in many cases preferring wire services for the majority of news content. What (many) newspapers have become are reprinters of wire copy padded by a myriad of opinion, editorial, and marginally ethical fluff “journalism”.
What Google should do is to set up a fund to help struggling newspapers re-staff their news divisions and a deeply discounted consulting wing to help owners – who have made the bad decisions that got us where we are today – understand that their only real commercial value springs from factual reporting.
