Making the Press Pay
November 6th, 2012 - 10:16 am
I can’t begin to tell you how much I love this story:
Mitt Romney “appears to be setting a precedent this election year in charging journalists and news organizations for any access to a presidential campaign headquarters on the night of the election,” Mass Live reports.
Romney “will be holding his election night gathering at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, where access costs anywhere from $75 for a chair in the ballroom to $1,020 for permission to use the media filing center. Broadcast news organizations will be paying up to $6,500 for workspace.”
They are not your friends. Treat them appropriately.
This is a VERY good sign for a potential future administration. I can almost see the whining editorials from all the usual suspects. Fingers remain crossed.
Okay, my appraisal of Romney just went up a notch or two! LOL Love this!
HA! I bet Obama wishes he’d thought of that. Maybe he’ll keep it in mind when they make pilgrimages to his post-presidential Hawaiian hideaway.
First thing Romney should do is close down the press room in the White House.
Why are we, (the Govt.) supplying them with offices in the 1st place.
Also, most will be out to destroy his presidency by any means available.
It’s not just the press, but several “non-profits” have free space in the middle of the west wing, between the main house and the West Wing offices. That space is over the swimming pool LBJ put in that’s still there, under the floorboards. I home Mitt likes to swim!
The pool was built for FDR to exercise, and paid for by the public. Johnson gave the space over to the jackals of the Press.
Since the MSM jumped into the bag for the Dems, perhaps some FCC licenses need to be pulled since they have not been operating “in the public interest”.
When you are Democrat Operative with a By-line, you have to expect pay-back.
As viscerally satisfying as that would be we have to resist such impulses. Quashing speech is a tool of the Left, and it’s conduct we shouldn’t imitate.
That’s not to say that a Romney admisitration is obligated to give them access. The press ARE going to be hostile to him and he should act accordingly. I just think talk of yanking licenses (which I think the government has no business issuing in the first place) is a bad idea.
Let them have their freedom of speech. Tell them they’re free to say and print whatever they like, as long as they identify the team they play for.
So Romney should tell them if they’re going to serve the interests of the DNC, they need to add a “D” to their acronym or “Democrat” to their name. Like DCNN, MSDNC, or the New York Democrat Times, etc.
I’ll wager President Romney will also NOT appear on “The View” or any late-night talk shows. He’ll decidedly restore dignity to the Presidency.
Or spending family vacations to a former FBI convict vineyard. Or commenting on David Beckham underwear.
Don’t count on it. If his handlers tell him that it makes him seem accessible and gives him a “common touch” that makes people more likely to re-elect him, he may be swayed to appear on the talk show circuit.
While Bill Clinton started this practice with his jam sessions on Arsenio and Obama has doubled-down on the practice, George W. Bush also appeared on talk shows. I distinctly remember him appearing on Letterman. (I can’t get the picture of Letterman literally sneering at him out of my mind. Letterman practically sniffed Bush like a suspicious dog.)
why stop there? Charge them an access fee to broadcast their programming to your house
Whichever way the election goes, conservatives need to engage the left-wing press massively in ways that help and encourage them to provided balanced, accurate and timely reporting sans ideological context (save that for the opinion/editorials) – or face severe financial consequences.
Awesome. They’ll skewer him for the next four years anyway if he is elected Pres (oh, please, please, PLEASE let it happen), so why not make them pay for the privilege of being the fact-challenged, willful idiots they are.
I simply cancelled my subscription to the local paper and will not watch ABC, NBC, CBS or CNN. If they lose large chunks of their income, they will not have as much influence.
Canceled my subscription to the big city rag, they endorsed that idiot Dem, Sherrod Brown for Senate.
When you are a loser, you beg for coverage. When you are a winner, they pay for coverage.
Why not fill the White House press room with legitimate journalists instead of letting the propagandists have free reign? Be more selective in issuing credentials.
I don’t like it, restricting the media is still too close to restricting the public. Instead, i’d like to see him give equal access to bloggers.
O.K., let’s say, simply for the sake of argument, that there are 50 seats available in the WH press room where the daily press briefing takes place. The question then becomes: how do we allocate those seats among the international press, the U.S. written and visual press, and bloggers. 10/20/20? What is “fair” and what is “practical?”
Why limit it to 50 seats? Why keep it in a format that limits participation at all?
Elkh1, I disagree. My point, here, there, and everywhere, is that government has no authority to create a separate class of citizen called “journalist” and give that person extra 1st Amendment rights. The media is all of us.
It’s a room. If it only has room or 50 seats, <bit only has room for 50 seats.
“government has no authority to create a separate class of citizen called “journalist” and give that person extra 1st Amendment rights”
How come they flash their “credentials” and get to places where ordinary citizens and bloggers are not allowed to go?
If they are not a separate class, they should pay and not pay like ordinary citizena. They can buy access with a puff piece and/or a cover-up of embarrassing incidents, or buy access with cash. Frankly, cash is more transparent, more equal, puff pieces and cover-ups are cynical, undetected contributions to their chosen candidates. E.g Crawley gave Obama 9% more time to answer her stupid questions, and intervened on Obama’s behalf when he was clobbered. Can you imagine an ordinary citizen in that position to run interference? Like it or not, they are a “separate” and privileged class.
Be real!
Mcgehee, why a room? When i suggested a different format, i meant it.
Elk, you’re not really addressing my comments.
“restricting the media is still too close to restricting the public”
You equate the “media” to the “public”. Are you hallucinating?
The media is a Democratic propaganda machine, eg. Candy Crawly. Obama restricts Fox News access from day one, and is chummy with MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, and the alphabet channels, in return for timely cover-up and puff pieces. Crawly attended his million dollars taxpayers funded State Dinner. The media is awfully incurious about Benghazi, has sent more “journalists” to examine Sarah Palin’s emails than to examine the death of a US ambassador. They took the Party line to blame a hapless parolee instead of Obama’s failure in beefing up security on 911. Enough said.
Only the legacy media needs to use a media filing center. The bloggers use smart phones, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. The bloggers don’t need work space, they text with their fingers. They are Romney’s supporters, they don’t need to pay the 75 bucks. Ergo non-paying bloggers have more access than the paying propagandists. Non-paying bloggers are the “public”, the media is the Democratic propaganda machine.
How about fill the front row of the White House press room w/ correspondents from PJTV, Fox, The Bigs, Hot Air… Make the alphabet media sit a few rows back.
I love it that Romney is sticking it to the Press. Now, he should announce that the money will go to Hurricane Sandy relief.
“They are not your friends. Treat them appropriately.”
I’ll drink to that. But not to them.
Interesting letter to the editor in Toledo Blade yesterday. Allen Block, CEO of Block Communications, parent company of the Blade submitted a letter calling for a Romney victory. His brother, the editor of the paper, and the whole editorial staff and newsroom are are a bunch of rat bastard commies.
I like it!
I’d like to see him go even further and boot the “White House Press Corp” out as well and allocate that real estate to…you know…actual government functions that the taxpayers are paying for within the peoples mansion.
Beyond that, I’d like to see him implement a means testing for any so-called journalists who want to attend White House functions.
I’m sure we can all come up with common-sense requirements, but at the top of the list would be a flat prohibition on attendance at White House pressers by any reporter who was involved in any way in Journolist, or who had blatantly and actively slanted coverage to help the previous administration.
This would include everybody at CBS news.
Candy Crowley would be persona non grata, of course.
Good Lord I’d love to see the old news organizations squirm as they realized they had burnt their bridges prematurely and realized they were now on the outside.
I bet you could get every bar owner in D.C. to sign a petition closing that little press camp-out in the White House.
+ 1 on Journolist ban. Those involved should be shunned as beneath notice by any professional news or PR entity, including the Presidents Communications Office.
Crowley is toast, as you can tell by just looking at her face lately.
Seems like a way to keep out bloggers.
Romney should get into the habit of responding to “gotcha” questions with “First tell me the date and topic on which you asked my predecessor a similar question, and then I’ll be happy to respond.”
We really hate the press. That’s the saddest thing to come out of the Obamisery Years.
No member of Journ0List should be allowed on government property period.
Personally, I’d love to see it noted in the comments or in reviews that these were/are(?) Journolist members every time someone involved in that particular shenanigan tried to post a story as “news”.
Take that scarlet letter and permanently affix it to their foreheads so they can never live it down as an example to the remaining non-Journolist members of the mainstream media!
The only currency the media has is the trust the public places in what they say.
Take that away from them forever.
My disgust with the Press goes back way before Obama. Back in 1975, my best friend’s older sister committed suicide. Some scumbag reporter got her suicide note and published it. The story was picked up by the AP and reported nationwide. Her family – already devastated by her death – received all sorts of awful mail. I’d never truly hated anyone so much as that reporter.
– underpriced!!!!
The money is trivial, but what a great principle to lay down.
He who rented the hall can charge what he likes.
“I paid for this microphone.”
Constitutional protection should be removed for the Press, and they should be eligible for slander and defamation suits like in the UK. Meanwhile, cancel your cable. You can always pick it up in the future, and get a better deal at the same time.
A President Romney should do some weeding amongst the White House Press Corps. There should be a fair number of them who are told their organization is welcome to send a reporter- but, not THIS reporter. If the Press Corps is just going to mail it in, they don’t need access to the President, do they?
“Constitutional protection should be removed for the Press,”
Sorry. Lost you right there. Apparently you aren’t from around here, Vlad.
Constitutional protection and immunity from slander suits aren’t the problem. The abuse of said protection and immunity is the problem. The solution is to reduce their market share in favor of less biased outlets until either the abusive ones go out of business, or they beg forgiveness. That’s how we do it in the States.
How can we make the press REALLY pay.
They have not been doing their jobs for a long time. The information content they put out is minimal at best. Bengazi, Fast and Furious, Voter Fraud. Instead of facts they treat opinions, polls, and feelings as news. The supposed fact checkers don’t check the facts and get it wrong when they do.
They need to be punished.
I generally don’t like boycots but boycotting their advertisers is the only method I can think of.
I don’t know how to organize something like that, but I don’t know what else to do.
What can be done to really make the press pay for their failures?