{"id":7062667,"date":"2026-09-21T03:10:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T03:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/news-media-are-you-learning-yet\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T03:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T03:10:14","slug":"news-media-are-you-learning-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7062667","title":{"rendered":"News Media: Are You Learning Yet?"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

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Trump has banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, and has threatened to ban the Washington Post and the New York Times. News outlets seem genuinely distressed about this. After all that sanewashing and normalizing \u2014 that enabled him to get elected \u2014 and he does this. Outrageous!<\/p>\n

But will they learn any lessons from this? We\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n

According to Politico<\/a>, Trump issued the ban Friday on Truth Social, while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, and white House staff were blindsided. Today reporters from the three media outlets were denied entry to the White House. I\u2019m sure lawsuits are being prepared if not filed already.<\/p>\n

At the Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes Speak at Your Own Risk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

This is far from the first time Trump has tried to pressure the media into giving him favorable coverage or punish those who run stories he does not like. As The New York Times<\/em>has documented<\/a>, Trump\u2019s Federal Communications Commission has repeatedly tried to intimidate networks over their airing of material that Trump finds offensive, including criticism of Trump<\/a> and interviews<\/a> with Democratic politicians, by threatening to revoke their broadcast license<\/a>. Three journalists fired from Stars and Stripes<\/em>, an independent media outlet that is federally funded, are suing the Pentagon, accusing it of silencing them because of their factual coverage of deplorable conditions for U.S. service members<\/a>. The Pentagon also sought to force media organizations to sign a self-censorship pledge in exchange for press credentials<\/a>. His Federal Trade Commission is investigating the liberal media watchdog Media Matters<\/a>, whose work consists mostly of just publishing the things conservatives say, and NewsGuard, a nonpartisan outlet<\/a> that provides \u201cscores for news and information websites based on nine journalistic criteria.\u201d Trump sought to ban the AP for refusing to identify the Gulf of Mexico as the \u201cGulf of America<\/a>,\u201d as Trump had ordered. This is not even close to an exhaustive list.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s campaign of censorship is not limited to journalists, however, and the First Amendment does not belong only to the media. Trump\u2019s Justice Department has sought to pressure American colleges and universities<\/a> over what they are allowed to teach, whom they are allowed to hire, and whom they are allowed to admit. It has used federal funding<\/a> to censor technological, medical, and scientific research. The administration has singled out left-wing organizations for scrutiny<\/a> and used federal resources to investigate them for opposing the president. It has sought to deport immigrants because of their pro-Palestinian views<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Some of that isn\u2019t just Trump. A lot of specimens in the Republican party have wanted to put speech controls on universities for a while.<\/p>\n

But while of course I side with the press on freedom of speech issues, the media really did bring this on themselves.<\/p>\n

See, for example, my post from 2022, How Jeff Zucker Made Trump<\/a>. Jeff Zucker is a guy with a long and ignoble record in television. When he was head of NBC Entertainment Zucker helped create \u201cThe Apprentice\u201d as a vehicle for Trump. And then as head of CNN Zucker helped make Donald Trump president. Zucker. was president of CNN worldwide from 2013 and until his resignation in 2022.\u00a0 In 2017 Warren Olney wrote in the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em><\/a> that Trump owed his election victory to\u00a0 Zucker.<\/p>\n

\n

During the election season, I saw entire Trump rallies carried live by CNN, interrupted only for mandatory commercials. Not only was there no critical fact-checking, there was no serious effort to provide context for viewers. Never raised, let alone answered, was the question: Why should a developer with a shaky reputation and no relevant experience be seriously considered for the most powerful job in the world?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

See also one of my other earlier rants, from 2017, Are Our News Media Learning?<\/a><\/p>\n

CNN to me may have been the most egregious of the cable news networks in covering presidential elections. In 2024 I remember a particularly bad interview of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz by Dana Bash of CNN. It was all \u201cgotcha\u201d type questions. This interview was not about helping viewers learn about the candidates; it was just entertainment. I remember turning it off after about fifteen minutes.<\/p>\n

But the other networks weren\u2019t that much better. Trump could issue statements that were barely more than word salad, and news media would somehow glean meaningful sentences out of them and report them seriously. His mental deterioration \u2014 which got called out on the former MS NBC at least \u2014 would be not noticed, and his obvious confusion about policy \u2014 like believing foreign countries and not importers paid tariffs \u2014 was carefully ignored.<\/p>\n

And I know the media were pulling punches because if they were as aggressive with Trump as they were with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, Trump would have had a tantrum, and right-wing media and Trump\u2019s supporters would have screamed to the rafters about media bias.<\/p>\n

But I say to you, news media, are you learning now?<\/p>\n

In other news:<\/strong> A couple of days ago WaPo ran a news story headlined Gas prices are about to take a big jump, analysts say, with the worst still to come<\/a>. The economy is thoroughly screwed. Just abvout everything is going to get more expensive now. And it\u2019s certainly not going to get better before the midterms.\u00a0 But at least we can hope that this will push midterm voters toward the Democrats. It\u2019s our only hope.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> I just saw a report at TPM by Josh Kovensky headlined A Far-Right Meltdown<\/a> that\u2019s a must read. It involves a men\u2019s only, Christians only group that is about a hard right as one can imagine that is working to get members into influential positions in government and business. Just read it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump has banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, and has threatened to ban the Washington Post and the New York Times. News outlets seem genuinely distressed about this. After all that sanewashing and normalizing \u2014 that enabled him to get elected \u2014 and he does this. Outrageous! But will they learn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175038],"tags":[1554,10999,1820],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7062667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trump-maladministration","tag-learning","tag-media","tag-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNews Media: Are You Learning Yet? - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7062667\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"News Media: Are You Learning Yet? - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Trump has banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, and has threatened to ban the Washington Post and the New York Times. 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