Trump team puts “brief ” in news briefing
This spiny red crab is one of the few brightly colored things scientists — sponsored by Museums Victoria and a government research organization — pulled out of Australia’s eastern abyss, two and a half miles below the surface of the ocean. Rob Zugaro, Blogging the Abyss , The Washington Post
washington» Sean Spicer, the embattled press secretary, spoke for 30 minutes Tuesday and didn’t answer some basic questions, including whether President Donald Trump believes Russia interfered in the 2016 election and whether Trump had seen the hotly debated Senate health care bill.
Once more freewheeling exchanges, White House press briefings have been shrinking in length and content as Trump’s senior aides clamp down on information and contend with the president’s own lack of message discipline and preference for speaking directly to his fan base.
The administration has erected other barriers to transparency as well, such as refusing to make its visitor logs public. And Trump hasn’t held a full news conference since February or participated in interviews since the end of April.
The White House’s lessis-best approach to public information has become more pronounced since Trump returned from his nine-day, five-nation tour in late May.
White House officials believed the trip garnered good coverage even though the president eschewed a longtime presidential tradition of holding a news conference overseas and provided only limited public news briefings.
About the same time, probes into Russian election interference and the Trump campaign’s possible role in it provided fresh incentive for the president and White House officials to avoid question-and-answer sessions sure to be dominated by the topic.
Those developments may have reinforced what was already on Trump’s mind: On May 12, he had tweeted, “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”
White House communications officials “obviously feel it has ceased to pay dividends” to follow their predecessors’ media strategy, said Eric Dezenhall, who worked on President Ronald Reagan’s communications team and leads a public relations firm in Washington. “They’ve decided to bypass the media completely and stop pretending there’s anything to gain.”
Dezenhall said that although he understands the strategy, “it’s terrifying from a democracy standpoint.”
David Boardman, chairman of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said Trump’s method of communicating via Twitter creates a compelling need “to follow up on those 140-character proclamations with questions.”
He said a trend toward less transparency has rippled through all levels of government, and the approach is set at the top.
Trump has swapped open discussion about politics and policy for his favored forms of one-way communication.
His frequent social media posts are read by millions of Twitter followers. “The Fake News Media hates when I use what has turned out to be my very powerful Social Media over 100 million people! I can go around them!” Trump boasted last week on Twitter.