“If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after.”

“What does it look like after”?  Well, if you’re actual reporters, not propagandists, a new renaissance!  Reporters — again, not propagandists — should be salivating!

According to Columbia Journalism Review:

“(ABC’s Jonathan) Karl agreed that Trump personally ‘answer(ed) more questions from reporters that any president I’ve experienced’ in his years of covering Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. ‘That’s a good thing.’”

That should be a dream come true if you’re in the reporting business. 

If you’re the propaganda business, not so much, and that should tell you everything you need to know about any individual with press credentials: If they are filled with anxiety rather than anticipation, they are propagandists, not reporters, because Trump was, without a doubt, the most press-accessible chief executive this country has had in the television era.

Now, does he complain about them? Yes. That hardly makes him unique among presidents. It appears to be his “fake news” appellation — thus the unnamed television executive’s above-quoted credibility concern — which upsets them most, and, given their appalling record with spin and hoaxes, is, in this writer’s estimation, completely justified.

According to CBC of Canada:

(Trump) has complained about fake news and has called out reporters by name… but he has never done anything but talk. …

That’s a crucially important distinction.  For all his trash-talking of “journalists,” Trump never put out a DOJ fatwa on any of them. 

But the reverse was true with the Obama administration, and once upon a time the press, including the left-leaning press complained about it.

Sure, the talk, the rhetoric from Team Obama was friendly, (with the notable exception of Fox News), CJR continued:

“The Obama administration ‘never engaged in public rhetoric against the press,’ noted University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters.

But the actions — up to and including criminal charges — were decidedly hostile. Underneath all that flowery talk there were evil machinations indeed, the CBC continued:

Obama's justice department tapped reporters' phones, dragged reporters into court… (and) it is entirely possible — likely even — that Barack Obama led the least transparent, most secretive administration in history, despite his campaign rhetoric. …

...

In his column in The Baltimore Sun, David Zurawik wrote: 'In fairness to Trump, his administration has not escalated the conflict with the press to a new level. It has not yet come close to doing what President Obama's administration did in making the act of reporting itself criminal behaviour.’

...

But in the case of freedom of the press, (Trump’s) bark has been far worse than his bite.  For real threats to press freedom, you have to look back to Barack Obama and his administration.

Obama kicked them like psychopaths kick puppies and back then they condemned it, yet today they adore him.  Go figure.

According to Variety guest columnist Julie Mason:

Obama, who campaigned on a promise to protect government whistle-blowers, made greater use of the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers and menace journalists than all other presidents combined.

Obama’s Justice Department accessed the personal email of a Fox News reporter and surveilled the reporter’s parents and colleagues. They seized the home, work and mobile phone records of journalists at the Associated Press.

...

In a bleak episode of unintended irony, an open-government group gave Obama an award for transparency in an Oval Office ceremony closed to the press.

And it wasn’t just access to Obama which was tightly orchestrated, it was simple government information from any one of dozens of federal agencies which reporters use in the normal course of business to inform their stories.

According to a 2015 column by Joel Simon, writing for CJR:

According to a recent AP report, the Obama administration last year (2014) set a record for denying and censoring requests for government information.

He straight up lied to them and they still, to this day, don’t care.

According to The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' columnist Sara Morrison:

On his first day on the job, way back in January 2009, Obama issued a memorandum declaring that his administration was ‘committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government … and establish a system of transparency’. This was one of his campaign promises. Seven years later, the president has fallen well short of this vow, and many journalists see his administration as the least transparent of all.

…

The Associated Press reported (in March 2016) that the Obama administration set a new record in the percentage of FOIA requests answered with either redacted files or nothing at all: 77%. That’s up 12 points from the first year of Obama’s presidency.”

I’d like to the think the press corps, as constituted, could be trusted to do their jobs as actual reporters, but if past is precedent and predictive of future behavior, we can expect another four years of the worst of both worlds from them:  Heated rhetoric and heated “journalistic” output resulting in a sewer of mis- dis- and mal-information.

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