White House palace intrigue is becoming an unhealthy obsession
good points in this article.
White House palace intrigue is becoming an unhealthy obsession
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/white-house-palace-intrigue-is-becoming-an-unhealthy-obsession
Ross Barkan
It doesn’t much matter if Bannon is canned. What matters, as always, is what Trump is actually doing – and what he still hopes to accomplish while in power
white house
‘What much reporting on the president leaves out is the real-world relevance and impact.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
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Saturday 19 August 2017 11.34 EDT
Last modified on Monday 21 August 2017 10.42 EDT
Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House is dominating all headlines and cable news coverage, as it was always fated to since the supposed Svengali of the chaos president first captivated the media last year. Bannon, the former (and future?) Breitbart mogul, was one of several Donald Trump acolytes singularly obsessed over, his status in Trumplandia an unending focus of journalistic firepower.................................................
................... Meanwhile, Sessions hasn’t gone anywhere. He is actively dismantling the Justice Department’s protections of civil rights and civil liberties. His mandate that prosecutors pursue the most serious possible charges in every case remains. He is drastically reducing the Justice Department’s oversight of police departments.
On other matters, Trump’s White House is chugging along. His EPA administrator, the climate change-denying Scott Pruitt, has stripped numerous environmental regulations. An executive order already rewrote major parts of Barack Obama’s clean power plan. In June, Pruitt moved to scrap laws that protect waterways that provide drinking water for about a third of the population.
In New York City, a vast system of public housing – sheltering more people than the entire city of Boston – faces devastating budgets cut from a Trump administration determined to make America as socially Darwinian as it can.
All of these things, at some point or another, drew coverage, but nothing on the scale of the media’s unrelenting desire to turn people like Bannon, Kelly, Scaramucci and Spicer into household celebrities.
These are the easy stories, less intellectually taxing and more likely to get a traffic or ratings spike. You don’t have to be a criminal justice or housing policy expert to write about why Joshua Green’s new book about Bannon is rubbing a narcissistic president the wrong way.
Just as relevant for a media class encountering an ever more distrustful public, documenting the machinations of a palace on fire allows journalists to avoid taking sides in a fight that matters. It continues the comfortable fiction of journalists as neutral, unbiased arbiters, with views somehow unruffled by the currents raging around them. Journalists don’t have to own their biases. They can play pretend.
They can keep your eyes and ears glued to the palace, sniffing for scoops. It’s safer there.
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