Washington Post

Filmmakers often tout the accolades their new movies have received from critics in the media via creatively excerpted blurbs. The new president is doing the same thing.

A page on the White House website, called “Praise for President Trump's Bold Action,” looks a bit like an ad for the latest blockbuster. A four-star review seems to be the only thing missing. Trump's team did, of course, pick the most flattering excerpts from these articles. The Chicago Tribune editorial board applauded the president's early focus on jobs but also wrote that “Trump's prickly temperament — his thin skin, especially — has already been a distraction.” So the “praise” for Trump's first week has come with a lot of qualifiers. But there is a clear strategy here: Trump wants to promote the idea that the negative media is coming around, admitting — perhaps reluctantly — that he is doing a good job.

In a floor speech, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), praised the physical and mental powers of President Donald Trump and encouraged people to get “unvarnished” news directly from the president, not from the news media.

“Just think what the media would be saying about President Trump if he were a Democrat,” Rep Smith said during the evening time reserved for one-minute speeches. “He has tremendous energy. He campaigned for 18 months, puts in 15-hour days, and has the stamina of a bull elephant, like Teddy Roosevelt. He is courageous and fearless. Given the amount of hate directed his way, no doubt he constantly receives death threats, but that doesn’t curtail his public appearances or seem to worry him in the least.” “The national liberal media won’t print that, or air it, or post it,” Rep Smith said. “Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” Rep Smith is also a member of the House Freedom of the Press caucus.

Chris Lehane no longer plants political attacks in the news media the way he did in the Clinton White House or for Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Instead, he opts for TV spots that feature happy middle-class families promoting Airbnb, the home-sharing company where he is head of policy.

Lehane is at the forefront of a war to fight fundamental threats to the company — scores of local laws that prohibit individuals from turning private homes into hotels, and the perception that Airbnb drives up housing prices by taking units off the market. He is trying to turn a cutting-edge $30 billion company into an organized political movement — one that is about helping a battered middle class earn extra money by renting out their homes.

White House Spokesman Sean Spicer should have listened to Ari Fleischer. After Spicer's flagrant misstatement of Inauguration Day crowd figures over the weekend, Fleischer — a former White House press secretary trying to help the current one — offered some free advice. “As soon as a press secretary gets into statistics and facts, the press is going to fact-check the press secretary,” Fleischer said. “So don't use a fact, don't use a stat, unless you're 100 percent certain you've got it nailed down.” But, Spicer stood before reporters on Jan 24 and delivered this whopper, in defense of President Trump's bogus claim that massive voter fraud cost him the popular vote in November: “I think there's been studies. There was one that came out of Pew [in] 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted were not citizens.”

It is hard to overstate what a brazen lie this was. I say “lie” — a loaded word that suggests Spicer knew he was telling a falsehood — because it is inconceivable that he believed it to be true. Trump has mischaracterized Pew's research on more than one occasion, and fact-checkers have crushed him for it. There is no way that Spicer, whose job requires him to obsess over media coverage, did not know that this absurd claim has been debunked.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Commerce Department, cleared a key Senate panel with bipartisan support, signaling an easy path to confirmation. The Senate Commerce Committee approved Ross's nomination in a voice vote with no opposition.

Ross amassed his fortune by investing in distressed industries that have been hard hit by the forces of globalization, including steel, coal and textiles. He was one of Trump’s key advisers on trade policy on the campaign trail and is slated to take a leading role in carrying out the White House’s promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. During his confirmation hearing, Ross advocated the need for bilateral trade deals rather than sweeping agreements such as the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership.

DC media stalwarts Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei (formerly of Politico, now of Axios) broke down President Trump’s media habits. No books, lots of TV. Newspapers, but only certain ones. Lots of political talk shows, both on the nets and on radio. We combined the Allen-VandeHei analysis with our own observations of Trump’s Twitter activity and statements to put together this approximate Week in Presidential Media-Watching.

President Trump has named Ajit Pai, an advocate of deregulation and a critic of the government's network neutrality rules, as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Pai's new position will give him control over the nation's most powerful telecommunication and cable regulator, with a 2-1 Republican majority that is widely expected to begin undoing some of the Obama era's most significant tech policies.

The Indian-American who grew up in Kansas had until now been a sitting Republican commissioner at the FCC — meaning he will not need to be confirmed by the US Senate before serving as the agency's 34th chairman. Pai was a staunch critic of Democratic efforts aimed at breaking the dominance of some of America's biggest Internet providers, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

President Trump began recasting America’s role in the global economy, canceling an agreement for a sweeping trade deal with Asia as one of his first official White House actions. After meeting with business executives to discuss the US manufacturing industry, President Trump headed to the Oval Office to sign an executive order formally ending the United States’ participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The move was largely symbolic -- the deal was unlikely to make it through Congress -- but it served to signal that President Trump’s tough talk on trade during the campaign will carry over to his new administration.

Questions about the Trump administration’s handling of factual information could lead to more of what has already happened in the past when there have been gaps in the government’s data: outside groups, including news organizations, trying their best to find answers. “[If] we can’t assume good faith and good practices in government data, it’s going to be a lot more work for everyone,” said JM Berger, a fellow with the International Centre for counter-Terrorism at The Hauge. “Government data isn’t always reliable or complete, and journalists and academics have filled in the gaps before, but if we have to question and vet everything on a consistent basis, it’s going to command a lot of our resources and make it harder to do new and important research.”

[Commentary] Here is one thing we learned about the new Trump White House: It views the institutional role that the news media is supposed to play in our democracy with nothing but total, unbridled contempt. We may be looking at an unprecedented set of new challenges for the media in covering the new president. What remains to be seen is how it will respond.

The New York Times reports this morning that journalists are deeply alarmed by statements made by Trump’s top advisers over the weekend, in which they faulted the media for reporting accurately on his inaugural crowd size. But I fear these journalists are understating the problem. This isn’t simply a matter of signaling bad relations. Rather, what President Trump and his advisers are doing is explicitly stating their contempt for the press’ institutional role as a credo, as an actionable doctrine that will govern not just how they treat the press, but how they treat factual reality itself.