Erik Wemple frets that the journalists tasked with covering Donald Trump’s White House are growing weary thanks to the “unsustainable” pace the president is setting — with long days, “ruined weekends,” and “unpredictable” moves.
From the Washington Post:
President Trump has attempted to undercut the U.S. media in a number of ways — by calling them the “enemy”; by denying coverage credentials to certain outlets during his campaign; by telling falsehoods and lying; by siccing his aides on reporters. As we close in on two months of the Trump White House, however, another strategy may be emerging: Outlast the media.
April D. Ryan, White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks, tells this blog that “this pace of covering this new president is unsustainable for the long haul.” That comment came amid a news-filled weekend that wasn’t supposed to be that way. According to a White House official quoted in The Post, Saturday was supposed to be a “down day, pretty quiet.” Someone forgot to tell Trump, who unleashed his now-famous string of tweets alleging involvement by former president Barack Obama in a Trump Tower wiretapping expedition.
All of a sudden, a down day for White House aides as well as for journalists became a tangle of tweets and phone calls and URLs. And this was a Saturday — a day when journalists could once unplug with minimal risk of missing a big story. “Nothing happens on Saturday,” wrote former Bloomberg staffer Dawn Kopecki in a widely read memo to colleagues. “We have very little readership and we’re often paying editors to kill time by surfing the Web.” That was 2015.
Read the rest of the story here.
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