According to The Washington Post (WaPo), President Donald Trump praised White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s “ratings” during a lunch meeting last month when asked about his spokesperson’s job security.
“I’m not firing Sean Spicer,” said Trump, according to a WaPo source. “That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”
In an article published Sunday, WaPo’s Ashley Parker and Robert Costa sought to examine the president’s television news media consumption and its impact on shaping the Trump administration’s politics.
Both Parker and Costa describe Trump’s consumption of television news media as an “obsession.” At no point in the article do they acknowledge the centrality of television news media in shaping national political discourse.
A heavy presidential on political communications strategies – including such details as one’s dress and body language – is not new or unusual; WaPo describes Trump’s media focus as “[upending] the traditional rhythms of the White House.
WaPo’s Parker and Costa make a peripheral acknowledgment of television’s ubiquitousness, at least with respect to senior Americans:
Trump’s quotidian viewing is unremarkable, based on his profile. Fox News’s average prime-time viewer last year, for instance, was 68 years old and mostly white, and the average American watches more than four hours per day, according to Nielsen data.
As a source of criticism of Trump’s “television obsession,” WaPo consults left-wing MSNBC pundit Rick Wilson, who they describe as a “veteran Republican consultant.”
Relaying conversations he claims to have had with a “number of Republicans in Congress and in establishment party circles,” Wilson casts Trump’s politics as superficially shaped by his television-watching:
“There are many conversations where it ends: ‘But of course, God knows, he could watch Fox News tomorrow and change his whole position.’ [Republicans] don’t get him, because he’s a creature of television and they’re creatures of politics. They care about the details, he cares about what’s on TV. [Trump] is a TV character to them, and they have to navigate around it.”
Parker and Costa present themselves as politically objective and non-partisan news media figures. WaPo similarly presents itself as a politically objective and non-partisan news media outlet; describing itself as a safeguard of America’s democratic institutions with its motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness:”
H/T Ken Meyer at Mediaite
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.