It’s two newspapers in one! The Washington Post ran a bizarre story about Trump and the media on the front page of the Style section on Tuesday. “Trump’s blacklist turns out to be a bit gray” was the headline. Trump’s campaign may deny press credentials, but reporters can easily just attend events and file stories, as Jenna Johnson for the Post is doing now.
But then the “blacklist is really gray” story ends with an overwrought quote from former Washington Post assistant managing editor Susan Glasser suggesting Trump was more “undemocratic” than Vladimir Putin in his press relations. “It is astonishing that something like this is happening in the United States.”
As usual, the Post didn’t bring up how Hillary Clinton kept David Martosko of the Daily Mail out of the press pool last summer, or how Barack Obama threw three McCain-endorsing newspapers off the press bus in 2008 to make room for three pro-Obama magazines. Trump is somehow the only candidate who’s ever done this.
Farhi elaborated on how “banned” reporters have more leeway than expected:
For the most part, Trump’s sanctions against the press haven’t made much difference. Although the dozen or so news outlets that have been blacklisted certainly object to being shut out, they say the restrictions are largely symbolic, an attack on traditional norms, and don’t deter reporting on the presumptive Republican nominee....
Those still on the banned list have found that Trump’s restrictions are often arbitrarily enforced and vaguely defined. Reporters from some blacklisted outlets still receive news releases from his campaign; others don’t. A day after Trump sanctioned The Post, one of the paper’s reporters got a call back from Trump’s press handlers, suggesting the lines of communications are still open (the campaign has been responsive to other Post reporters in recent days, including Johnson).
The Post reporter discussed how Trump has granted plenty of access to Posties writing a book on Trump to be released in August....and never suggested the Post had a book unit on Hillary Clinton:
The Post doesn’t know yet whether Trump’s sanctions against the newspaper extend to the Republican convention next month or to the team of reporters who are producing a book about him. The Post’s book team has interviewed Trump many times, including two weeks ago, when he expressed enthusiasm for the project and invited the journalists back for more interviews. But Trump has also publicly trashed the book, telling Fox News at one point that the paper has been asking him “ridiculous questions” about his past.
Nowhere in this article did Farhi compare this to the Hillary Clinton campaign, or note that Hillary only recently granted one 10-minute interview to the Post, the first of her presidential campaign (which Anne Gearan publicly squandered in puffball questions). But somehow it’s Trump that reeks of authoritarianism:
The real objections to Trump’s actions from the press aren’t about the inconvenience; they’re about the seemingly undemocratic nature of his actions. Candidates of every party rarely like the coverage they get, but few have resorted to banning a reporter, let alone entire news organizations.
“When I was in Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin gave me credentials to cover his reelection campaign to a second term even after several years of critical coverage of his crackdown on Russian media and rollback of democratic reforms,” said Susan Glasser, the editor of Politico, whose beat reporter was banned by Trump in March. “It is just astonishing that something like this is happening in the United States.”
Perhaps Glasser should read her fellow liberals at PunditFact, who explored the dramatic decline of press freedom in Putin's reign and the deaths of 34 journalists. That's better than Trump?
PS: Farhi misquoted Trump a bit by citing “Trump’s remarks that Mexican immigrants are ‘rapists.’” When Trump announced his presidential campaign, he offered the very clunky line that “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
