Is The Reason That No WH Pressers Televised Or Taped Because......

[global1]

the WH doesn't want anything on the record any more so that they can lie without being called for lying?

Now without a recording (taped or recorded) a reporter can say that Spicer or Huckabee said something - and the WH can challenge them and say we didn't say that - the reporter must have heard it wrong or misinterpreted what was said.

This way nothing is on the record to be used against them in case Trump contradicts something that was said on record at a presser.

Is this what is going on or does the WH have a different explanation?

[DetlefK]

1. The internet never forgets. And "No news is good news".

[CincyDem]

2. Of course...recordings are facts and the WH is hellbent on being a fact-free zone. n/t

[global1]

5. So Let Me Get This Straight - We Have A WH That Doesn't Want To Go On Record & A Senate/Congress....

that wants to pass bills that nobody has had a chance to see or read.

And we're not calling what happened in Nov 2016 a coup d'etat?

[cilla4progress]

8. I sure as hell

am

[brooklynite]

9. It's not a coup; the Country got the Government it wanted...

...within the framework of our electoral process. (complain all you want about representative democracy; it's not the system that's been in our Constitutions for the past 200 years).

Bottom line is: enough people decided that "traditional" politics wasn't getting anything done for them, and voted for something else. I think they'll have buyers remorse in 2018, but we'll have to wait and see.

[pangaia]

3. Of course it is...

[Hortensis]

4. Reporters can confirm each others' accounts.

Just more incredibly, astonishingly incompetent trumpianism. To the point that I think we can assume this order came from him.

Lol. Reportedly, Rump doesn't like all the attention to press conferences, and interpretations by the press who attend them, preferring to use tweets to communicate "directly."

He's also blaming Spicey for not selling his lies (he seems to come to believe them himself) and has him looking for someone else to take over the briefings. Spicer will supposedly be kicked upstairs and behind the scenes. Not allowing Spicer to be seen or heard now may also be Rump's idea of just plain kicking him around a bit.

[Not Ruth]

6. Learning about WH Pressers

But my impression is that there are a lot of reporters in a small room, and that only a few selected ones are allowed to speak. That does not seem fair. Why is that accepted?

[Hortensis]

7. Good question, and don't have the answer myself. However,

I've read that before this administration, the WH press corps reportedly developed a far too chummy, "insider" relationship with the WH they were supposed to be covering. I remember listening to NBC's Kelly O'Donnell back in the Bush days while I was cleaning and assuming from what she was saying that she worked for the WH.

Worse, this is just part of the "insider" mentality of a whole class of DC lobbyists, elected and appointed officials, businessmen, attorneys, press, etc. They are the people who sit at the nation's cool table, and the rest of the nation isn't. We never had such huge money in DC, and even such huge power concentrated there. People who attain insider status increasingly have not wanted to leave and are doing what they have to to remain.

Notably including replacing their individuality with the group personality. We see the group's accepted attitudes and versions of reality acted out by talking heads whenever we turn on political TV shows. Top management politics and profit considerations have to also have strong influence on the thinking of people determined to not lose their elite status.

Anyway, all this is of course extremely corrupting. The group personality began to reject Hillary Clinton starting in Arkansas days, and by the time they'd moved to DC, or not long after, this developed into an absolute requirement for belonging. This was also the period when conservative propaganda had become centered in DC and grown to swamp the nation. A pundit who might want to call out the lies against her, or to counter the group's fake equalization between Democratic actions and Republican, knows from what's happened to others that his DC/TV career would be over.

So, deny it all they want, most of these people worked consistently to sink Hillary and thus turn DC over to predatory archconservatives, and they actually now "own" the consequences. Anyway, I think the answer to this question of "acceptance" is in there somewhere. Good news, of course, the cozily corrupt relationship with this one person at least has temporarily been broken. The bad news is...

[wiggs]

10. All day yesterday the media was talking about that and about the Trump

attorney dust up. Dissecting what it means, empaneling pundits, analyzing to death.

It was time not spent on health care.