On Sunday, Daily Wire Editor-In-Chief Ben Shapiro appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to discuss the media brouhaha engendered by Donald Trump’s tweets in which he attacked the cast of Hamilton for their lecturing of Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence. Shapiro and host Brian Stelter also discussed the cast of Saturday Night Live attacking Trump in their most recent episode. During the segment, Shapiro consistently pointed out that the same actions of Trump being criticized by the media had been executed by Barack Obama for eight years.
Shapiro was accompanied by CNN’s Salena Zito and the New York Times’ Charles Blow on the panel. Stelter began by commenting that Trump could not resist lashing out on Twitter, citing Trump’s tweets:
Stelter opined, “I’m speechless … The big question is now, is President-Elect Trump going to continue to make the media a real issue? Or is this all just a big distraction; would he rather have people talking about his tweets than the various controversies he’s facing and his conflicts of interests involving his businesses?”
Stelter asked if Trump was tweeting his attacks to distract from other issues. Blow responded that Trump, as someone who grew up in Queens, was still focused on the New York City orbit, and thus was attacking New York media. “It’s almost as if he has not completely moved into the realm of being the president of the entire United States.”
Referring to Trump’s tweet stating, “This should not happen,” Stelter said that Trump’s comment could have a chilling effect on free speech. Shapiro responded:
It isn’t my favorite thing; I would recommend that conservatives who look at President-Elect Trump doing this and saying, “Well, it seems okay to me,” just imagine if the shoe were on the other foot for a second and it were Barack Obama lecturing NASCAR fans as he got booed at some sort of NASCAR event. It doesn’t seem totally appropriate for the president-elect of the United States to be doing this. On the other hand, I would recommend that the media kind of take a second look at how much focus they put on things like this because if you’re going to turn it all the way up to 11 on a Hamilton tweet, this is going to be a long presidency for all of you.
When Stelter asked if Shapiro thought the media had indeed “turned it up to 11,” Shapiro reiterated:
Yeah, I think the mainstream media has been at 11 since the election and I think that means there’s no place to turn it from there; I think this is sort of the problem with the 2016 election. I think there were a lot of aspersions cast at Mitt Romney, and then when you came back in 2016 and cast the same aspersions at Donald Trump, who was a very different candidate, I think a lot of people just tuned it out.
I really think the media is in danger of blowing its credibility if they’re going to be so exuberant of covering every aspect of Trump’s foibles, because there are going to be some things he does which are actually probably not very good, and you’re going to want people to pay attention to it, and if you pay the same amount of attention to a Hamilton tweet that you do to for example something that I think is significantly more troubling, President-Elect Trump meeting with business partners from India while he’s the president-elect; that seems to me something where you ought to be putting more focus if you’re actually going to point out problems here..
In the next segment, Stelter wanted to talk about the issue the media had with Trump because he went out unaccompanied by the press pool–something very unusual. Former ABC White House Correspondent Ann Compton, who replaced Zito on the panel, pointed out that for 50 years, the president had been accompanied by the press pool. She stated, “Access to the president has to be in person by the reporters covering the White House covering the president or president-elect where he is. In advance, the Trump organization was told that if they just handed out a photo that was taken by the Trump staff or by the Japanese, that the American media won’t use it. If it’s an event which should be open to press coverage, the media is not going to use the photographs any more that they would take a written print-out of the president or president-elect and read it on the air.”
Stelter turned to Shapiro, who commented:
I think the expectation that he will make himself available to the press is a good one, and I hope that he does do that, especially after he becomes president. I think there may be some different standards for president-elects than presidents; Ann would know that better than I would. But beyond that, the press access for the last eight years has been quite terrible, and many members of the press have complained about this. The White House was releasing its own photos and tapes of events and not really allowing the press to cover it in the way the press wanted to cover it. For years, the DOJ was targeting people at the AP. There have been a lot of problems between the White House and the press long pre-dating Donald Trump. That’s not an excuse for Trump not to do the right thing here, but it is worth putting in context.
When Stelter asked Shapiro about the numerous figures in the right-wing media that have been bandied about as possible Trump appointees or advisors, Shapiro pointed out that, again, those kinds of actions were not unprecedented, and it was important to see the situation in context, as Obama had acted similarly by appointing figures from left-wing media.
Stelter replied, “You may say left-wing media; I wouldn’t call Time Magazine left-wing, but Jay Carney did come over from TIME to become the White House press secretary.”
Shapiro grinned, “Some of us would. There you have it.” He continued:
But the bottom line is, the reality is, that some of the issues that we’ve been discussing there will be a bit of a disconnect between the media and the rest of the United states because the way that people read media stories is that they read them as binaries, with good guys and bad guys. And so when you have Trump attacking Hamilton, or you have Trump attacking SNL, a lot of people across the country, instead of looking at what’s appropriate for a president to do, they go, “Okay, so someone attacked SNL. Who cares? Okay, someone attacked Hamilton. Do I really care about that? Is that something that matters to me?”
While a lot of folks in the media, and a lot of people who watch the presidency, we say, “This is not a great thing, when he’s attacking private citizens,” and again, if Obama had done the same thing for people on the right, and he did do the same thing many times, we complained about it very loudly, I think there’s a likelihood that a lot of people are just going to say, “This is not a big deal. Why should we focus so much on a Broadway show and a spat between the President of the United States and some actors.”
Parts one and two of the segment are below: