Erik Wemple

After CNN won a temporary restraining order returning to Jim Acosta his White House press pass, the Trump administration issued a letter informing Acosta of its “preliminary decision” to revoke his hard pass based on his “conduct” at the Nov. 7 news conference. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said, “The White House cannot run an orderly and fair press conference when a reporter acts this way, which is neither appropriate nor professional.

As national media organizations contemplate how to mitigate their trust deficit with the American people, a solution emerges from the 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey: Bag the coverage of President Donald Trump and Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency, and go wall-to-wall on zoning hearings, bus-route changes, liquor-license revocations and softball games. Local news, that is. The survey, after all, shows that people trust sources of local reporting far more than national outlets.

[Commentary] CNN is sui generis as a target of President Donald Trump’s onslaught against the press. It’s a serially abusive situation.

[Commentary] There is no shortage of explainers detailing President Donald Trump’s limited ability to mess with the First Amendment. No, he can’t just snap his fingers and “open up” our libel laws so that he can more easily sue news outlets that publish scoops about him. No, he can’t just shut down a large broadcast network whose reporting he doesn’t like. There’s a lot of bluster in the president’s widely disseminated attacks on the press.

A joint news conference in February between President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prompted numerous complaints from big-time media outlets. They’d been shut out of the Q&A session in favor of news outlets that they considered friendly to the interests of the Trump White House.

In a discussion about the kerfuffle, Fox News host Shannon Bream asked colleague Howard Kurtz whether such outlets had fretted in the past, when Fox News had been iced out. “Nobody much cared about that in the mainstream media,” responded Kurtz. “I guess that Fox News is part of the mainstream media, but….” I guess? Whoa for a moment here. This is Howard Kurtz, Fox News media critic and a longtime observer of the national media scene. And he isn’t 100 percent sure whether his employer is part of the club known as the mainstream media?

President Donald Trump has attempted to undercut the US media in a number of ways — by calling them the “enemy”; by denying coverage credentials to certain outlets during his campaign; by telling falsehoods and lying; by siccing his aides on reporters. As we close in on two months of the Trump White House, however, another strategy may be emerging: Outlast the media.

The frenetic nature of the Trump White House was apparent to those who’d watched the frenetic nature of the Trump campaign. “We’re used to Donald Trump as a a candidate making wild accusations at the spur of the moment and that becoming the dominant news story immediately,” says Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Philip Rucker. “So we’re all trained.” And staffed up. Outlets such as Politico — with seven White House reporters — and The Post and the New York Times — six apiece — upped their White House staffing to historic levels. The early weeks raise questions as to whether those deployments will be sufficient.

NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker cited a disputed report that Yemen had withdrawn permission to the United States to conduct anti-terrorism ground missions in that country — a result of a raid that resulted in civilian casualties as well as the death of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6. Despite reports and commentary insisting that the operation failed, Spicer has insisted that it was a success. Welker asked him, “Does that not undercut the administration’s ability to fight terrorism in that region, and do you stand by your assessment that it’s a success?” There would be no policy change coming from the podium. “It’s absolutely a success,” said Spicer, whose boss has shown a fondness for labeling his own ventures “successful.” “And I think that anyone who would suggest it’s not a success does disservice to the life of Chief … Owens. He fought knowing what was at stake in that mission, and anybody who would suggest otherwise doesn’t fully appreciate how successful that mission was — what the information that they were able to retrieve was and how that will help prevent future terrorist attacks.”

The message? Uh, media outlets — and anyone else, for that matter — had better not undermine “the success of that” raid — as if questioning the raid after the fact could possibly alter anything about the action.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer fielded a question about the executive order temporarily barring entry into the United States of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries. “He’s also made clear that it’s not a Muslim ban, it’s not a travel ban. It’s a vetting system to keep America safe,” said Spicer. Following up on Spicer’s protestations about the word “ban,” NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker noted the tweet above: “He says it’s a ban.”

Alluding to the wonderful symbiosis and spirit of cooperation between the White House and its press corps, Spicer responded, “He’s using the words that the media’s using,” said Spicer in a tribute to the overwhelming power of the modern media. “But at the end of the day … it can’t be a ban if you’re letting a million people in.” Welker wasn’t going to accept that tripe. So she pointedly noted that the president had called it a ban. “Is he confused or are you confused?” she asked. “No, I’m not confused. I think that the words being used to describe it are derived from what the media is calling this. He has been very clear, it is ‘extreme vetting.'” Except for that tweet, which has been retweeted nearly 34,000 times and liked nearly 160,000 times. Perhaps Welker’s remarkable moment of accountability journalism can set to rest all that silly talk that the media shouldn’t pay much heed to Trump’s tweets. Or maybe media organizations should check with Spicer & Co. before characterizing Trump administration initiatives to avoid overly influencing the president of the United States. Because we don’t want to mess up their messaging.

As President-elect Donald Trump and his people lay waste to various media-government norms and standards, they now appear intent on defanging the retraction request. The Presidential Transition Team on Tuesday issued one such document that accused CNN of the following journalistic malpractice: “On January 16, 2017, CNN broadcast a story by Manu Raju, titled ‘First on CNN: Trump’s Cabinet pick invested in company, then introduced a bill to help it,’ which omitted facts and drew conclusions in an effort to attack President-Elect Donald Trump’s designee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Tom Price.” The piece, said the retraction request, was “blatantly false.” It was not.

Reporters hung out with Donald Trump over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago, though American news consumers won’t be reading too much about the event. That’s because it was all off-the-record, meaning that Trump could say anything he wanted, and the journalists who heard it all couldn’t pass along a single word.

Mike Allen, the former Politico mainstay turned correspondent for start-up Axios, tweeted some pictures from the event. Those were allowed by the authorities.

There is plenty of precedent for reporters doing off-the-record discussions with presidents, and the tradition remained strong in the Obama years. The rationale for attending is that journalists can get a window into the president’s thinking on stuff. And the rebuttal to that rationale is that the president uses the opportunity to spin reporters on his position, without any fingerprints on the transaction. It’s a way of getting the media to internalize the official view of things.

New York Times Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller said, “Our policy on off-the-record with presidents and presidents-elect is to push long and hard to do things on record.” However: “With journalists, you need some insight into the president-elect’s thinking. We have found in the past that this has helped us with Obama,” says Bumiller, arguing that the exposure has given the newspaper the “thought and direction to pursue stories afterward.”