First Trump transition

On Monday afternoon, reporters stationed inside Trump Tower begged Martin Luther King III to attack President-elect Trump over tweets concerning Democratic Congressman John Lewis (Ga.) following a meeting on the day honoring King’s father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Friday’s edition of Dateline NBC featured the long-planned hour-long special Reality of Hope dedicated to outgoing President Barack Obama and, naturally, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt stayed clear of all Obama scandals in lieu of gush over his so-called accomplishments. 

Esquire’s Pierce readily concedes that Ben Carson (“an elite neurosurgeon”) and Mike Pompeo (“graduated at the top of his class at West Point”) are smart guys. In a way, though, they’re also tragic figures, he suggests, since they’ve “had to tailor their politics and their public personae to cater to the anti-rational, theocratic, anti-intellectual Id of modern conservatism…This means that both…

Congressman John Lewis’s infamous interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, smearing the president-elect as illegitimate, was the first segment aired on Meet the Press on Sunday. What’s apparent from the video is that not only did Lewis stick to his accusation, but Todd failed to push back at all. At one point he asked the congressman, “You're a man of action. You have been your whole life. You believe…

ABC had clearly picked sides in the fight between President-elect Donald Trump and Congressman John Lewis, who claimed Trump was an “illegitimate president,” during their Sunday morning programming. The network spent that time slamming Trump for his counterattack on the congressman, even tying it to Martin Luther King Jr. “You know, just five days before the inauguration and one day before MLK…

Things got messy on NBC’s Saturday Night Live as they demonstrated that BuzzFeed’s salacious claims of Russian blackmail were a hit piece against the President-elect. The show’s cold open was a recreation of Trump’s press conference from earlier in the week, with fake reporters asking ridiculous questions such as: “I would like to ask you about your big Russian pee pee party.” And it only went…

There are predictable signs that after eight years of giving the problem inadequate attention and occasional ridicule, the business press has decided that federal budget deficits and the national debt are going to start to matter again. Gosh, I wonder why? The Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber was relatively subtle about it in a report on Uncle Sam's December and year-to-date budget deficits…

Is it hasta la vista, baby, for the venerable White House daily briefing for the media? Way back there in 1955 James Hagerty, the press secretary for President Dwight Eisenhower, came to the conclusion that admitting television cameras to presidential press conferences  Ike held in the Indian Treaty Room of the next-door to the White House Old Executive Office Building (now named for Eisenhower)…

Critics from across the media spectrum have slammed BuzzFeed for publishing something they failed to corroborate, a 35-page dossier of smarmy allegations against Donald Trump that was assembled by a firm hired to do opposition research on the GOP candidate. But on CBS Saturday morning, Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg saluted BuzzFeed’s decision to disseminate the anti-Trump hit piece: “I’m…

ABC seemed to be holding out hope Thursday evening on World News Tonight that BuzzFeed’s salacious accusations against President-elect Donald Trump were true. “The Russians and Trump have angrily denounced the allegations as completely false, including the unverified claim that Trump was secretly recorded when he visited Moscow,” declared Brian Ross giving the impression that the president-elect…

Demonstrating the power of fake news to influence uninformed people, just-elected Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire brought up a thoroughly discredited Washington Post story at the Senate confirmation hearing for Former General John Kelly. President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated Kelly to be the nation's next head of the Department of Homeland Security. Hassan brought up the…

Logic and proportion may be non-factors in media coverage of Donald Trump’s presidency, fears Lloyd Grove. In a Wednesday column, Grove opined that journalism “is in danger of passing through the looking glass, only to land in a menacing, topsy-turvy world, namely the White House Press Room…It’s likely to be [a] place where language will occasionally signify its opposite, and government…

CNN's Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter blasted Donald Trump on Thursday's New Day over the President-Elect's treatment of the media at his Wednesday press conference. Acosta, who got in a face-off with Trump, expressed his "hope...that Donald Trump can get past this...'Clinton News Network, CNN sucks' mentality that we saw out on the campaign trail." Stelter bewailed how "the environment right now is…

Unprecedented times bear unprecedented conflict, and the fog of conflict is often rife with rumor, speculation, and fake news. Such is the case in the denouement of Trump v. Univision, and it is important to unpack this story and separate the wheat from the chaff.