No wonder the mainstream media are upset.
On election night, the main stream media and their coastal elite brethren were shocked at the results. They were shocked because they’ve been living in a bubble for decades. Four weeks into the Trump presidency, they’ve done very little to burst out of that bubble. The Trump administration, through the use of “Skype seats” at White House briefings, is trying burst the bubble for them.
The MSM would do themselves a favor by listening to the questions from the Skype seats and following up on those stories.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media are resisting.
Since the beginning of time, aka the day after Helen Thomas was born, the White House press corps has been focused on the inside the beltway meme of the day. The “Skype seat” is challenging that daily D.C. groupthink and highlighting the concerns of real Americans. In addition to the “Skype seat,” the MSM is not enjoying losing control of the narrative, and it shows.Take, for example, this piece from Salon, “Sean Spicer’s Skype seats experiment has pretty much jumped the shark.” Salon is upset, not at the local outlets that got a question, but that someone from The Federalist Papers dared to ask, “what are the president’s plans for rolling back the expensive and burdensome regulations of the administrative state …” Salon was most upset with the part that said there were “unaccountable bureaucrats” in Washington affecting the lives of normal Americans.
Slate said, “More deeply, it is an effort to inject into mainstream discourse, even after it has been rejected for decades, demagoguery about right-wing bogeymen like ‘unaccountable bureaucrats’ who make their own laws.” Well memo to Slate, that notion hasn’t been rejected for decades and it is spot on.
Since Woodrow Wilson decoupled rule making from lawmakers, the rule-makers promulgate rules that carry the weight of law, every single day.
They are by and large unaccountable to anyone.
Slate’s main problem is that their friends in the MSM are losing control. Here’s a look at the first couple of days with Skype seats, and the questions that were asked.
The second day of Skype questions was on February 3, 2017. Again four questions were asked via Skype. The first was from a local South Florida television station asking about if or when the president would reinstate the “wet foot, dry foot” rule regarding Cuban refugees. The second was from a Manchester, NH station asking about the opioid addiction crisis in the nation, which affects New Hampshire in particular. The third was from an ABC affiliate in Phoenix asking about the Veteran’s Administration. The Phoenix VA has been at the epicenter of the crisis. Finally, the last question was from an Alabama talk radio host about when Trump would end Obama’s DACA and DAPA orders.
None of these questions were on the media groupthink of the day. They were about the issues that the people who elected the president care about. They were about the promises the president made to communities and people. Many of them are promises that the MSM can’t believe he would fulfill, like repealing DACA and DAPA, and allowing coal to be dug again.
The MSM would do themselves a favor by listening to the questions from the Skype seats and following up on those stories. Sending reporters to those areas to report on them. Then, maybe they’d see why after four weeks of constant media drubbing some polling still has Trump positive or near even in terms of favorable, vs. unfavorable ratings.
Source: Trump’s ‘Skype seats’ is a move to break up the MSM’s media stranglehold