US Politics: Fake Media Outmaneuvered! Story Behind BuzzFeed

As Trump Places Faked News in It's Place, a New Strategy Is Needed to Cover Him - Yeah TRUTHFUL REPORTING!

U.S. president-elect Donald Trump forcefully refused question from CNN's Jim Acosta
"I will not take your question you are fake news!"

1-13-17, Jim Rutenberg, MEDIATOR, New York Times -- [excerpt*]  Trump’s inaugural news conference as a duly elected United States president-to-be, in which he called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage,” dismissed CNN as “fake news” and more or less told the whole lot of reporters at Trump Tower to stuff it when it comes to his unreleased tax returns because everyday Americans don’t care and, anyway, “I won.”
 
There were two big lessons in the Wednesday morning melee:
 
1. Mr. Trump remains a master media manipulator [he responds and corrects faked news - that's not manipulating it] who used his first news briefing since July to expertly delegitimize the news media and make it the story rather than the chaotic swirl of ethical questions that engulf his transition.
 
2. The news media remains an unwitting accomplice in its own diminishment as it fails to get a handle on how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.
 
The media better figure things out, fast, because it has found itself at the edge of the cliff. And our still-functioning (fingers crossed) democracy needs it to stay on the right side of the drop.
 
Journalists should know this by now: Trump’s gonna Trump. But it’s time for them to take a page from the 12-step playbook — accept the things they cannot change and then find the courage to change the things they can, in the right ways, not the wrong ways.
 
Given Mr. Trump’s past behavior, there was hardly any doubt that he was going to kneecap his inquisitors. But BuzzFeed handed him the steel rod hours before, with its decision to publish an unvarnished dossier filled with unsubstantiated, compromising reports about Mr. Trump allegedly collected by Russian agents, presumably for blackmail purposes.
 
BuzzFeed said it was “publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.” Ben Smith, the BuzzFeed editor in chief, wrote that “we have always erred on the side of publishing” and that “publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.” This 'media' has built up a fine traditional news team that has won journalism awards precisely because it succeeded in the ultimate purposes of its craft: to establish fact from fiction and enhance its readers’ understanding of reality. That’s the opposite of pumping out a bunch of unsubstantiated allegations and then leaving it to readers to “make up their own minds” about them with no reportorial guidance.
 
There was collateral damage [from] Mr. Trump’s “fake news” charge against CNN, in front of many millions of Americans. CNN drew Mr. Trump’s hostility by breaking the news on Tuesday that a former British spy had compiled the Russia dossier and that intelligence officials included a synopsis of it in briefing materials for the president-elect. Once CNN opened the door, BuzzFeed followed by publishing the document itself.
 
BuzzFeed's Smith said he was “not going to participate in an attempt to divide the media against each other.” Mr. Trump won again, by succeeding in doing just that. It was all part of a show in which he used news organizations as props in their own lampooning while he played them off each other with labels of good and bad and selectively answered their policy questions. A united front would have given the reporters stronger footing. But that was woefully lacking when Mr. Trump shouted down Jim Acosta of CNN, who said Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, threatened to eject him [which he did after the event warning of future such behaviors].
 
*Full original article here
 
A version of this article appears in print on January 13, 2017, on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Outgunned, Outmaneuvered and in Need of a Game Plan
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