by Alex Lloyd Gross
Forget about endorsements. They don’t mean anything. They are what five or six members of an editorial board sit down and come to a consensus . Both Donald Trump personally, and the Joe Biden campaigns either disenfranchised members of the media, or flat out screwed them over. This is not the editorial boards but rather the boots on the ground reporters. With Trump he was adversarial almost out of the starting gate. Members of the media would not report the stories he wanted reported or wrote not so flattering things about him. He coined the term “FAKE NEWS”.
Now, some people are frequently calling the media fake, and lives have been put in danger. Especially at high profile or dangerous events, like riots or protests. Some protesters are hostile to the media due to Trump’s comments. In fact at one of his rally s, One deranged Trump supporter jumped on the media platform In El Paso and started pushing and punching media members. No one was hurt.
Trump has made fun of media members who have gotten hurt at protests and at his press conferences, he has sparred with media members that dared challenge him.
At least Trump allows the media to work.
Biden’s campaign screws anything not a huge big city paper or wire services, when it comes to Biden or Harris. The sad fact is that if Biden was not running against Trump, these tactics would hurt his campaign. The handlers and PR flunkies think it’s a GREAT idea to hold events in a huge space, allow a few hundred supporters in ( usually it is much less) but tell media representatives they cannot come. This is due to COVID-19, they say . Everyone wants to be safe. No media member wants to get this virus. While Trump himself caught the virus along with several of this staffers, Biden and Kamala Harris were lucky, they did not, some of their staffers were not as lucky.
The Biden campaign has what is called a “Pool shooter”, who is given access while other members of the media get to stay home and go through a stack of unpaid bills. This “pool shooter” comes up with substandard, ho-hum images. Sometimes it is a print journalist shooting with a cellphone. The photo is good if it is a souvenir photo. Nothing more. You, the reader deserve more and better. Sometimes no images are sent at all. Representatives of other organizations not necessarily wire services or dailies get access to smaller events. When they go, they complain to the PR people about their lack of access to other events . It falls on deaf ears. At a recent Jill Biden event, no less that eight media representatives complained .
The Biden PR Machine is not smart enough to know that most of their coverage comes from social media. They are thinking like it is 1975. Here is an example: They will put out a general release that Kamala Harris will campaign in Philadelphia. More details to come. The next is Kamala Harris to speak at a rally Pool coverage only, closed press. The media is not told where. They may invite the Inquirer, which is not getting anywhere near the readership it once did in 1975. The reason is lots of smaller papers that are online only are stealing their thunder and their readership. Many people do not trust major media outlets, or are blocked from reading stories due to a paywall. The smaller outlets are eating up the larger ones. The smaller ones are owned locally while the larger ones are headquartered out of state or out of this country and are owned by a hedge fund.
That means more people are reading the content from smaller media and they are getting shut out of Biden events. The message Biden is trying to send is not getting through as well as it should be due to the fact fewer people are getting their news from more well known sources. All they have going for them is their name.
So the pool will send out a note saying they are in South Philadelphia, or Northeast Philadelphia, or wherever. Meantime all of the smaller media who can get the story out are getting screwed. They are given the excuse of COVID-19 which is hogwash. Media covering the event know how to social distance. They do it all the time. They have no contact with the candidate. The Biden campaign will try to put in on the United States Secret Service. That is not insulting your intelligence but it insults your stupidity.
Unless the media member poses a security threat, they are never denied. The Biden campaign is deliberately keeping out media, while saying they “advocate for you”. The problem is, this kind of behavior, if left unchecked can lead to even more job loses. The Obama administration was notorious for shutting out the press and giving out free hand out photos. This lead to a serious backlash and layoff’s within members of the media.
When media members, who just wrote a very positive article on something Trump did go to cover a different event, many of the same media representatives are subjected to hostile chants or even threats. Sometimes it is just a comment by an uneducated buffoon.
With the advent of the internet, people share articles via all kinds of platforms. That is how news gets disseminated. The Biden PR people are not in tune to the fact that they are killing jobs. Trump is not educated enough to know that the more you call the media names, the more hostile they will be, or he just does not care. .