Even with the campaign over, Donald Trump is continuing his war with the Media that has decided he is the Worst Thing Ever. He had scheduled a meeting with the New York Times’ executives and an on-the-record meet with reporters. However, he took to Twitter to say that the plans had changed.
I cancelled today's meeting with the failing @nytimes when the terms and conditions of the meeting were changed at the last moment. Not nice
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016
Perhaps a new meeting will be set up with the @nytimes. In the meantime they continue to cover me inaccurately and with a nasty tone!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 22, 2016
Trump has long taken advantage of the Media’s negativity toward him, and it has worked for him. The Official Paper of Record (lol) is going to understandably be upset here, and they will lash out in some way. Probably a statement condemning Trump’s apparent lack of transparency or some such. And, as Trump is hoping for, the masses will say “Guys, we get it. You don’t like him. We don’t care.”
The Media has yet to learn that the best way to take the air out of Trump’s Anti-Media sails is to simply not give it any extra coverage. Within an hour of Trump announcing via Twitter that he wasn’t going to meet with them, CNN had a story out. In particular, there was this gem regarding Trump’s comments on the Times getting complaints about their coverage:
That references a November 19 article from the newspaper’s Public Editor, Liz Spayd, who said that the number of complaints coming into the public editor’s office is “five times the normal level” — the largest since September 11, 2001. She said “there is a searing level of dissatisfacton out there with many aspects of the coverage.”
Trump responded that he “can fully understand that,” but he wondered why the paper would announce that complaints were up. The reason, simply, is that the role of the public editor is to critique the newspaper’s coverage and serve as liaison between readers and the editors.
The New York Times didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
You know Politico will have a write-up of it, too. If the Media is truly pissed about Trump and the attitudes he’s stirring up, then they would simply not respond to this. But they can’t help themselves. It’s totally newsworthy what media outlets he will and will not meet with, apparently.
To be fair to the New York Times (UGH), Trump’s complaints are could very well stem from their coverage of his very potential conflicts of interest. That was on the front page of their paper, after all… No. Not above the fold. That magical space was reserved for the Pence/Hamilton Cast spat from over the weekend. Which tells you everything you need to know about why the Times is seeing complains about its coverage.
The Media will hopefully someday learn that their choice of coverage does indeed matter, and that they really need to be smarter in how they tackle their adversarial relationships with Republican presidents-elect.
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