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“I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to reporting . . . I’m the policy-type nerd,” said a woman to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing on Monday, before asking, in notably policy-nerdish fashion, “So what direction do you advise me to go into?”
It would have been a strange question for a reporter — whose job it is to hold power to account, rather than ask power how to propagate its message — to put to Leavitt at a press briefing, but this was no reporter. It was Kambree Nelson, a “grassroots activist turned social media influencer” and ambassador for the esteemed “American First Policy Institute”, with more than 600,000 followers on X. A woman who got most upset last year after she stopped being able to see the moon in the sky. “Why is everyone silent about this?” she posted on X. “They are quiet about the white sun, too” (a reference to a conspiracy theory that argues the sun has changed colour in recent years).
Nor, in fact, was this a press briefing. No, this was a brand new propaganda dissemination session — sorry, a “New Media” briefing, as the official White House YouTube channel described it — that was held on three consecutive days this week.
It might have been more subtle for Leavitt to have stuck to the official title rather than introduce each session as an “influencer briefing”, which rather gave the game away as to its purpose. “I wish more people in the legacy media were like you,” Leavitt replied to Nelson. (No doubt.) “The president is doing so many phenomenal things every day that will never be mentioned on cable news . . . which is, again, why we’re welcoming in independent voices like yours, with followings on social media, because that’s the best way to get those truths and those facts out there.”
This isn’t the first step the White House has taken in its crusade against so-called legacy media, a term popularised by Elon Musk, who described us in December as a “non stop psy op”. Trump has already banned the Associated Press from briefings because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” (I guess I’m banned now, too), which a district judge has ruled as unconstitutional. Last month, the Trump administration removed wire services’ permanent spot in the press pool. And this week, the White House launched its own news-style website, whitehouse.gov/wire, featuring only the most glowing coverage of the president, of course.
I can see what they are trying to do here. For a start, the establishment — a term with slightly less decrepit connotations than “legacy” — media has a major representation problem. A 2022 study by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications of 1,600 American journalists found that just 3.4 per cent of them identified themselves as Republican, down from 7.1 per cent in 2013 and 18 per cent in 2002. More than 10 times as many, 36.4 per cent, identified as Democrats (51.7 per cent said they were “Independent”).
Further, the establishment media have got a lot of things wrong in recent times, in particular — and not coincidentally — in the nine years or so since Trump crash-landed on to the political scene. From the covering up of Joe Biden’s frailty to explicitly reducing the objectivity of reporting to portraying those who questioned the Wuhan wet market origin story for Covid-19 as conspiracy theorists, some mainstream outlets have often seemed more interested in pushing a particular agenda than seeking the truth.
But it is easy to miss the wood for the trees: just because there have been some — indeed too many — examples of getting it wrong doesn’t mean that institutional media, with all its checks and balances and on-the-ground reporting that “New Media” usually sorely lacks, can even be slightly compared with these Maga mouthpieces.
And let’s be clear — these new “influencer briefings” are not, as Leavitt claimed, an attempt to “speak to all media outlets and personalities”. I watched all three and spotted no left-leaning outlets or personalities. I did spot Sean Spicer, one of Leavitt’s predecessors; bitcoin fanatic turned Trump superfan Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano; and Arynne Wexler, “just a nonlib girl in a crazylib world”, who started with: “I can attest to the deportations in Florida: my Uber drivers finally speak English again, so thank you for that.”
To treat these “influencers” as if they are on a par with serious journalists is not just disrespectful; it’s dangerous. And holding a briefing in which only friendly propaganda disseminators are welcome might be OK in Pyongyang, but this is meant to be the capital of the free world. For a president who usually seems to have such an instinctive grasp of what makes for good optics, this is, frankly, a terrible look.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
