The Trump administration is doing something that the mainstream media is desperate for you to miss. Dredging from the worn pages of the liberal media playbook, the old establishment elements of the White House press corps are pushing forward a narrative designed to make the Trump administration look petty and mean spirited. They've taken the substance of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's comments on Sunday and constructed a story that casts Trump as a petulant ogre, quibbling about the size of audience attendance at the Inauguration last Friday. But, as usual, the mainstream media and elements of conservative media have missed what is really going on. In this instance, the debate about size matters and it's a fight worth winning.
Over the last eight years of the Obama administration, truth has become something rare, an endangered species more elusive than the Himalayan snow leopard. The lie has become standard fare as the Compulsive-Liar-In-Chief constructed a world of fancy in which the lilliputian acts of man bog the cosmic cogs and render an ominous climate change that seems to transform to suit whatever allegation is most convenient. We occupy a minute sliver of the earth's surface, but in Obama's world our omnipotence reaches to raise or lower the vast seas. Science is prostituted to service fiction so that a panicked public may be goaded a bit farther down the collectivist trail of doom. And, slithering through his demented consciousness is always the great, white serpent of racism. The terrible coils of hate clutch at the roots of the party of Jim Crow and have never relinquished. Obama's America bears guilt from its inception and is a story spun from the infernal halls of the Kremlin. And, in all this and more, the media has been perversity's enthusiastic protege. The American people have wearied of this and have rejected the smiling lie, the politician who has engaged in a vile concourse with the euphemistic.
Trump is, in part, a reaction to the professional politician and his crisp pant creases. But, what Trump is after and what Spicer is achieving is a reformulation of expectations and behavior. The Trump administration is setting a standard of real, practical truthfulness. And, reminding the old media that the information landscape is changing dramatically, that the keepers of the flame aren't the big networks but new digital networks composed of constellations of muscular intellects that wage war on the fields of influence, unencumbered by liberal corporatist overlords bent on strangling conservative constitutional thought in its crib. Trump has been the most outspoken advocate of the new media and of its power to circumvent the crumbling and pock marked avenues of traditional news and information. Access is now a function of truth-telling, a meritocracy of thought that does not recognize the old aristocracy of mainstream media entitlement and privilege.
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The Trump administration has recently granted White House press passes to members of the new media and has reserved space for Skype access. This is a seismic realignment in terms of media access and expectations. It is a democratization of information access that could only be opposed by the fascist. The big story here is that we are witnessing the patronage of the 18th century underground press but in digital form. The spirit of The Sons of Liberty may have found a compatriot in Trump, having granted access to a new cadre of writers and thinkers in the mold of Isaiah Thomas and his Massachusetts Spy.
The recent flap over the number of people who attended the inaugural is, in itself, a fabrication of the mainstream media. Sean Spicer never claimed that the size of the audience present was the biggest in modern history, rather, Spicer rightly claimed that the size of the audience attending the inaugural in person and globally, via electronic means, was the largest in modern times. A number of photographs have been bandied about by the media that have just about as much relevance as the Zapruder film in proving the existence of a "third shooter." For a detailed analysis of the highest resolution photos available, see @BennyJohnson's thought provoking piece here. However, none of this is really the point. And, Trump detractors would like for all of us to get lost in the weeds. The real issue is the liberal media itself and the tired, old games that it tries to play, grasping for relevance in an environment of increasing complexity and a liberality of thought. Gone are the days of the nightly news anchor and the monolithic media complex spewing truth speak from the shuttered halls of the Ministry of Truth.
Undoubtedly, Trump can be imprecise and given to a showman's penchant for puffery. Interestingly, "puffery" is a legal term of art and describes language that is common in business and is understood to be an exaggeration which no reasonable person would take literally. However, inside the beltway, the elusive "reasonable person" is akin to the deep woods Sasquatch, a creature more of myth than reality. Certainly, the ranks of mainstream media stooges have been purged of any reasonableness or rationality. The winnowed chaff are humorless husks with the instincts of automatons. Their tongues wag reflexively to the liberal punch tape spinning behind their painted, ceramic eyes.
Trump has unbalanced the old system dominated by the information aristocracy and has dared to challenge the sacred cow of false narrative. One of the great failures of the last Bush administration was its refusal to challenge the lie with truth. Trump is far too egotistical to let his efforts lie under a mound of media excrement. But this kind of ego will serve America well since Trump is, at heart, a patriot.
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