The current regime has announced that they are following the authoritarian’s handbook when it comes to controlling the media. Banning the AP from the Oval Office and other press events with the liar-in-chief wasn’t enough for them, so now they’ve decided that they will decide which reporters and media outlets will be allowed to cover the office of the president in the WH Press Pool.
The NY Times’ chief White House correspondent Peter Baker likened the move to
“how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.”
Thankfully, David Dayen – executive editor of The American Prospect and one of the best journalists working today – had already agreed to be our guest today. In addition to the never-ending torrent of shit being propelled against the wall (and there’s another ton of it today), I’ll ask him about the current state of a free press in the US and what these actions portend.
I spoke about a few of David’s recent articles at TAP, but I quoted one on today’s show that I will also excerpt here. But I hope you read the entire piece, “The Coup Has Failed“.
I’m taking a pundit risk by saying that we now have that answer, after one month in office: Trump’s cooked.
His failure has followed the usual direction of political overreach. Brave dissidents from the political opposition, corporate America, or his own coalition didn’t suddenly rise to the challenge. It started from the bottom up, as the governed gradually but definitively withdrew their consent, giving space for those we somehow call “leaders” to distance themselves.
This doesn’t mean that the subsequent three years and eleven months will be a garden of earthly delights. Terrible things are going to happen. Good people will be persecuted and bad people elevated pretty much every day for the next 1,400 or so. But when Trump disgracefully walks out of Washington in 2029, I’m far more inclined to believe that we will have a government to return to.
I hope that gives you a bit of hope, as it did me. I try to find at least one morsel each day like that to help me get through these truly difficult days.
