“Presiding Over the Funeral of Access Journalism

So, yesterday, I wrote:

How about everyone just ignores the White House press room?

Send the AP guy to get a recording, they ship that out to the news agencies and papers, and everyone else just spends their time fact-checking that and reporting on what they ACTUALLY DO and ignoring what they say except as anecdotal filler for the bottom of the column?

Here’s the Washington Post today (emphasis mine):

Official words do matter, but they shouldn’t be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration.

White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements – achieved by closeness to the source – are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.

As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren’t going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let’s all do that.”

The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.
Sean Spicer’s remarks, full of falsehoods, should inspire journalists to dig into what matters.