CPUd
01-29-2017, 05:21 PM
Trump’s Only Master: Cable News
The president’s inflamed tweets about Chelsea Manning and Chicago are activated by cable news, which he cannot seem to tear his eyes away from.
Like Chance the Gardner, the television-obsessed simpleton who becomes a top presidential adviser in the political satire Being There, Donald Trump likes to watch TV.
But unlike the character in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel and the 1979 movie adaptation, the 45th president of the United States also likes to kibitz in public and, more often than not, act on what he’s watching.
“Other presidents have probably watched TV coverage more than they admitted, but this is unprecedented,” said political science professor Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “This is how Trump has been trained. He has been trained to live and die by what is said about him on TV and what the press writes about him for most of his lifetime. This is simply the norm for him—what he has done since he became a public figure. Nothing’s changed.”
In the latest example of the president’s TV news-fixation—early Thursday morning, more than an hour before the sun came up—Trump was apparently monitoring Fox & Friends First in the White House residence when co-host Abby Huntsman did an item about Chelsea Manning, the dishonorably discharged soldier who passed secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was handed a 35-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act.
With the chyron “UNGRATEFUL TRAITOR” filling the bottom of the screen, Huntsman reported that Manning was “sounding less than grateful for former-President Obama cutting nearly 25 years off of her sentence for leaking classified information. In a new article for The Guardian, the disgraced former Army private is slamming Obama as a weak leader with few permanent accomplishments!… Commuting Manning’s sentence was one of the final acts Obama performed as president.”
A scant 14 minutes later (as CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter first reported), Trump sent out a tweet that appropriated Fox News’s words nearly verbatim: “Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!”
This was one among many instances of Trump exercising a fanatical preoccupation with whatever is emanating into his ears and eyeballs from the cable and broadcast news shows.
Is he vying for the title of Couch Potato in Chief? As Stelter recently suggested, half in jest but wholly in earnest, it might be “time to re-up my idea for a new cable news show: ‘Good Evening, Mr, Trump,’ a show produced with one specific viewer in mind.”
The New York Times reported this week that television news viewing is indeed the anchor of the president’s daily schedule.
“He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing,” Times’s Maggie Haberman wrote. “But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.”
Needless to say, every president going back to George Washington has taken a professional and personal interest in how they’re portrayed by the Fourth Estate.
But Trump’s television obsession can only be likened to that of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who—in the early days of network news, as America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam War was escalating—famously installed a multi-screen contraption at the White House, which allowed him to watch all three evening newscasts at once.
“LBJ couldn’t be more different from Donald Trump in so many substantive ways,” said former CBS anchor Dan Rather, who covered him, “but Johnson did watch television as much as he could and reacted to it. Of course, he didn’t have a Twitter feed.”
A Texan like Johnson, Rather reported on the war for CBS and toiled as a White House correspondent, most famously in the Nixon years.
He recalled that he was visiting his wife Jean’s parents in Smithville, Texas, in the winter of 1966 when he received a phone call from LBJ, who opened the conversation with one of his favorite icebreakers for misbehaving reporters: “Rather, are you trying to fuck me?” Johnson used similarly salty language with CBS President Frank Stanton after the network broadcast Morley Safer’s damning 1965 report showing U.S. soldiers torching a Vietnamese village.
“He was getting hell not only from the press, but the press was included,” Rather told The Daily Beast. “I was in the press pool when LBJ said—and this is a direct quote—‘I’m like a bitch-dog in heat. When I stand still, they stick it to me, and when I run they bite my ass.’ We don’t have presidents that talk that way anymore.”
...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/27/if-fox-news-says-the-earth-is-flat-will-trump-believe-it.html
The president’s inflamed tweets about Chelsea Manning and Chicago are activated by cable news, which he cannot seem to tear his eyes away from.
Like Chance the Gardner, the television-obsessed simpleton who becomes a top presidential adviser in the political satire Being There, Donald Trump likes to watch TV.
But unlike the character in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel and the 1979 movie adaptation, the 45th president of the United States also likes to kibitz in public and, more often than not, act on what he’s watching.
“Other presidents have probably watched TV coverage more than they admitted, but this is unprecedented,” said political science professor Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “This is how Trump has been trained. He has been trained to live and die by what is said about him on TV and what the press writes about him for most of his lifetime. This is simply the norm for him—what he has done since he became a public figure. Nothing’s changed.”
In the latest example of the president’s TV news-fixation—early Thursday morning, more than an hour before the sun came up—Trump was apparently monitoring Fox & Friends First in the White House residence when co-host Abby Huntsman did an item about Chelsea Manning, the dishonorably discharged soldier who passed secret military documents to WikiLeaks and was handed a 35-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act.
With the chyron “UNGRATEFUL TRAITOR” filling the bottom of the screen, Huntsman reported that Manning was “sounding less than grateful for former-President Obama cutting nearly 25 years off of her sentence for leaking classified information. In a new article for The Guardian, the disgraced former Army private is slamming Obama as a weak leader with few permanent accomplishments!… Commuting Manning’s sentence was one of the final acts Obama performed as president.”
A scant 14 minutes later (as CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter first reported), Trump sent out a tweet that appropriated Fox News’s words nearly verbatim: “Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!”
This was one among many instances of Trump exercising a fanatical preoccupation with whatever is emanating into his ears and eyeballs from the cable and broadcast news shows.
Is he vying for the title of Couch Potato in Chief? As Stelter recently suggested, half in jest but wholly in earnest, it might be “time to re-up my idea for a new cable news show: ‘Good Evening, Mr, Trump,’ a show produced with one specific viewer in mind.”
The New York Times reported this week that television news viewing is indeed the anchor of the president’s daily schedule.
“He rises before 6 a.m., watches television tuned to a cable channel first in the residence, and later in a small dining room in the West Wing,” Times’s Maggie Haberman wrote. “But his meetings now begin at 9 a.m., earlier than they used to, which significantly curtails his television time. Still, Mr. Trump, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television.”
Needless to say, every president going back to George Washington has taken a professional and personal interest in how they’re portrayed by the Fourth Estate.
But Trump’s television obsession can only be likened to that of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who—in the early days of network news, as America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam War was escalating—famously installed a multi-screen contraption at the White House, which allowed him to watch all three evening newscasts at once.
“LBJ couldn’t be more different from Donald Trump in so many substantive ways,” said former CBS anchor Dan Rather, who covered him, “but Johnson did watch television as much as he could and reacted to it. Of course, he didn’t have a Twitter feed.”
A Texan like Johnson, Rather reported on the war for CBS and toiled as a White House correspondent, most famously in the Nixon years.
He recalled that he was visiting his wife Jean’s parents in Smithville, Texas, in the winter of 1966 when he received a phone call from LBJ, who opened the conversation with one of his favorite icebreakers for misbehaving reporters: “Rather, are you trying to fuck me?” Johnson used similarly salty language with CBS President Frank Stanton after the network broadcast Morley Safer’s damning 1965 report showing U.S. soldiers torching a Vietnamese village.
“He was getting hell not only from the press, but the press was included,” Rather told The Daily Beast. “I was in the press pool when LBJ said—and this is a direct quote—‘I’m like a bitch-dog in heat. When I stand still, they stick it to me, and when I run they bite my ass.’ We don’t have presidents that talk that way anymore.”
...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/27/if-fox-news-says-the-earth-is-flat-will-trump-believe-it.html