Roy Exum: Trump's Latest Delight

  • Sunday, February 26, 2017
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

I was quite amused this week when Donald Trump’s administration “locked out” several news organizations from the daily press briefings at the White House. The reason I loved it because in the 50 years I have spent in the news business, I have been locked out of press conferences, too. To be truthful, I am a longtime veteran of a bunch of “you versus me” squabbles and, if I do say, I am darn near undefeated in back-and-forth bully fests. The reason? I’m the one with the ink.

The first rule in public relations – never get in a fight with the guy who buys ink and newsprint by the truckload.

Sure, you can ban a reporter, or even an entire newspaper, but what no public figure nor any public institution can bear is for their news to dry up. When I refuse to cover somebody in the public eye, they or their team/business might as well be dead. And trust me, I’ve seen several who soon see the error of their ways.

On Thursday Trump knocked out the New York Times, CNN (so slanted it is now called by some as the ‘Clinton News Agency’), the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and some other openly-liberal sources from the briefings. At the same time, those organizations that are much more fair -- Breitbart News and The Washington Times, for instance, are still welcome to attend. Reporters from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Fox News also have no trouble finding a chair. The Associated Press and Time Magazine chose not to attend in solidarity, or something equally inane.

It is glaringly obvious to me that Trump is having great fun jerking the news media’s chain and, no, the actual news will not be compromised at all. First, the briefings are aired live, for Pete’s sake, but this is a way for Trump to “pay back” the frightful manner that his campaign was treated by the most liberal bunch of reporters I can ever remember. And just as the President anticipated, the liberals are absolutely beside themselves. Donald is playing with them in the exact way a cat torments some poor mouse, I am telling you, and from a distance it is a hoot to watch.

The real truth is that there are plenty of bums and a great bunch of jerks throughout the media industry. They have this false sense of entitlement when, in abject reality, they are losers. At the same time, there are seated politicians who I equally detest. When two groups of rabble come together, I’ll guarantee you there is going to come a rouser.

In the past year, I have never seen any equal to what the national news media has done to Trump. Candidly, I find myself agreeing with him more time than not. I dislike his in-your-face style, his lack of aplomb, but compared to Hillary being in there, lordy me! I’ll admit I am a redneck in rural America. Yet nobody, especially in the media, would have ever guessed that our nation would have as many of us “despicables,” much less deplorables.

When Murray Arnold was the basketball coach at UTC – this in the early ‘80s – we were both pretty headstrong and, what began as something petty, mushroomed into quite a donnybrook. I covered UTC basketball that year – went to every game – and Murray was never quoted, not once. I put UT basketball, with color pictures on the front page, and UTC was always in the back of the paper. He had never had anyone tell him he was wrong. And then prove it.

Murray was at such a wit’s end by the end of the season he got national announcer Billy Packer to come to a big banquet at the Choo Choo and urge everyone there to cancel their subscriptions. So help me, we never got a call. That spring we called a truce but Murray had already hanged himself; he didn’t coach at UTC much longer. When Johnny Majors was canned in a horrible way at Tennessee, I totally ignored Phillip Fulmer for his alleged part in the coup. We had a great writer on UT football and never skipped a beat but my column went to Tuscaloosa, Auburn, and Athens. Finally, Phillip and I settled things and we ironed out some differences. To this day, we are good friends.

Trust me, I’ve stood up when I’ve had the need. I called out some poorly-advised parents at Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts for boorish behavior at a recent school board meeting and – boom -- here came the profanity-filled emails. Several delighted in claiming they had asked Chattanooga.com advertisers to boycott the website. Boy, did those parents ever show me … that I was precisely right about the type people they were.

Asking advertisers to boycott is idiotic. People advertise to sell products and services and there is a very important adage why boycotts never work: Only a fool lets his money get mad. Ads on Chattanoogan.com are effective and they produce clients. Do you honestly believe some guy who screams “Liar!” at a school board official has the wherewithal to talk a guy out of advertising because the rube doesn’t like a reporter? The only damage the crowd of indignities at CSLA accomplished was to sully the school’s reputation. Believe me, I’m ‘over’ people like that in a hurry.

You see, there is something else that always happens when somebody gets in a fight they will never win. Anybody that stupid won’t stay in the game very long. Trump’s attack on the NY Times and CNN and the Washington Post is a divide-and conquer-strategy. Look at it this way - If the White House isn’t on CNN, the fickle viewers will simply watch CBS or Fox instead. The viewers could care less about who is fighting – they only want the news.

Trump is doing exactly what he intends to do – rattle the liberal media. His victory over Hillary was a horrible blow to the very out-of-touch news executives. They’ve tried to excuse the eggs on their faces but the feeling is they are frauds because their pages reflect it. Give Trump a trophy for standing up to the pompous. We redneck writers love it.

royexum@aol.com

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