President Trump Speaks at CPAC – February 22, 2025.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Katherine Leavitt, announced that the White House Correspondents Association would no longer control press poll assignments. For decades, the establishment media have used a cartel-like organization to prevent new media competition from gaining access to the President. That’s over now as the Trump administration increases access and transparency for all media.
A group of DC-based journalists, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the President of the United States.
Not anymore.
Today, I was proud to announce that we are giving the power back to the people.
Moving… pic.twitter.com/PkNui6Qleu
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) February 25, 2025
This is only one of many ways in which President Donald Trump has diminished the power of the legacy media. At The Spectator, Cockburn reports on the recent words of Fox News pundit Sean Hannity, who explained that “legacy media is dead.” Cockburn explains Trump’s role in killing it, writing:
Sean Hannity played the role of the coroner for traditional news outlets in an interview with Mediaite this morning. “That’s why legacy media is dead — they don’t know it yet, because they don’t tell the truth. They lied about the cognitive state, they lied about immigration, they lied about the economy,” he said before pulling out a list of other untruths that seemed more like an autopsy than anything else.
The irony is clear: Hannity has been working for Fox News for the last twenty-nine years, so what separates him and Fox from the media that he declares dead? Well, he would say it’s the legacy media’s lies and weaponization against Trump, evidenced by the fact that the American public voted for him anyway. “They throw everything they have at this man,” Hannity said as he went through other items in his postmortem examination, including lies about January 6, Hunter’s laptop, and the Russia/Trump scandal.
It is no secret that Trump has a friendly relationship with Fox News. In fact, NPR reported in January that nineteen Fox pundits, personalities and producers have been chosen by Trump for high-level positions in his current administration. A few of these include Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy and Tulsi Gabbard.
It’s easy to imagine Trumps sitting on his couch at Mar-a-Lago, watching Fox News while scrolling on Truth Social, before saying something like, “I like that guy — and more importantly, he likes me. Let’s put him in charge of the Department of Defense.”
Despite being unprecedented, there seems to be some wisdom to Trump’s strategy. The pattern indicates that Trump likes putting media-trained, household names from outside of the bureaucracy at the top, but places someone familiar and integrated into that world right underneath them. The only exception to this seems to be Dan Bongino, former political commentator turned deputy director of the FBI, who serves under Kash Patel as the director of the FBI.
So, is the legacy media dead? Perhaps. The White House’s shift toward allowing “new media” into the spaces of legacy news may be a good indication of what’s to come — and this afternoon press secretary Karoline Leavitt shook things up further by stripping the White House Correspondents’ Association of the power to select the press pool…
Read more here.
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