NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen thinks that for the time being, mainstream media outlets should give inexperienced reporters -- interns -- what’s typically considered among the juiciest of plum assignments: White House correspondent. That, he argued in a Sunday piece on his site PressThink, would be a far more effective way of covering the current administration than we have now.
Sean Spicer’s Saturday statement about the size of the crowd at President Trump’s inauguration rankled Rosen, who called it a “spectacular display…mixing provable falsehoods with culture war attacks on the journalists assembled before him.” Rosen speculated that Spicer was tacitly telling the press, “You will be turned into hate objects whenever we feel like it,” a stance that plays well with Trump’s base, which has been “primed for this [by] years of acrid ‘liberal media’ critique.”
Nonetheless, Rosen declared, “Our major news organizations don’t have to cooperate with this…They can [go] from inside-out, where access to the White House starts the story engines, to outside-in, where the action begins on the rim, in the agencies, around the committees, with the people who are supposed to obey Trump but have doubts.” (Italics in original.)
Rosen indicated that if you want the truth about the Trump White House, don’t look at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, and noted that if high-powered journalists removed themselves from the premises, it’d be harder for the POTUS and his team to rage against the mainstream media machine (bolding added):
When I say #sendtheinterns I mean it literally: take a bold decision to put your most junior people in the briefing room. Recognize that the real story is elsewhere, and most likely hidden. That’s why the experienced reporters need to be taken out of the White House, and put on other assignments.
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Look: they can’t visit culture war upon you if they don’t know where you are. The press has to become less predictable. It has to stop functioning as a hate object. This means giving something up. The dream of the White House briefing room and the Presidential press conference is that accountability can be transacted in dramatic and televisable moments: the perfect question that puts the President or his designate on the spot, and lets the public see -- as if in a flash -- who they are led by. This was always an illusion. Crumbling for decades, it has become comically unsustainable under Trump.
…I’m not saying: devote less attention to Trump. Rather: change the terms of this relationship. Make yourself more elusive. In the theater of resentment where you play such a crucial part, relinquish that part.
