Quite frankly, I don't give a shit about who the administration allows at the press briefings. Just ask yourself this - could the Trump administration have pulled off what the Bush administration did with the Iraq war, where the "fourth estate" was essentially acting as the propaganda arm for the Bush Admin, with some token liberal caricature playing the role of the useful-idiot pacifist foil to some admin-approved war-monger?
As now we're living in an age of White House Soap Opera, I particularly don't see the need for him to ban the mainstream media except to take a pointed jab at the press's coverage of the administration. However, I, much like you, think it has the potential to work to the public's advantage even it's temporarily to the press's disadvantage.
That's because
I 100% agree with you on the dire need for the press to have an adversarial relationship with any administration no matter which party's candidate makes it to the Oval Office. As a liberal, I wouldn't care if the candidate I voted in was exposed for corruption or bad foreign policies. My allegiance is not to the party with which I identify on policy issues but to the principle of the government being answerable to all of us as the American public and the government being transparent as to its intentions. I also cannot abide the sycophancy with which the mainstream media in the past has literally acted as a propaganda arm for past involvement in wars. Frankly, no American has wanted any long-range involvement in the Middle East, but it's been fed to us as desirable for reasons like bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to a heathenish world.
Except I have very pointed questions which exposes the selfish and self-serving hypocrisy of all past administrations and enables the public to be freed from delusion as to our modus operandi: Why haven't we brought democracy to North Korea which is currently a communist state and a totalitarian dictatorship? Or even Russia that though poses as a democracy to the world is in its operation a de facto dictatorship? Or what about China who has long believed that democracy is incompatible with its cultural values and has only some democratic elements within the "republic" that is run in an autocratic style? Could it be that since these countries are nuclear we don't actually want to spearhead destruction their way by spreading "freedom" and "democracy" in bombing them to kingdom come because we'd instigate WWIII and be in return destroyed ourselves? How quaint and generous and selfless then our leaders are to tell us all the time about the necessity of bringing "freedom" and "democracy" in the Middle East; oil, the profits from the arm dealers and other war machines in what is essentially a war racket, and indulging Israel as our friend to humiliate and subjugate the Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims is all a mighty handsome compensation and all a display of our past administrations' "generosity."
And if we should next go to war in Iran on a pretext of freeing the people from oppression, we should all know that this is another example of our unfailing generosity, especially since we were also the generous ones to
wage an ignoble campaign to topple the enlightened Shah regime to enable the fall of the state to Ayatollah Khomeni's iron fist. And
did I mention how generous we were when we in 2006, as Wikileaks detailing cables on Syria show, believed that we should topple the Syrian regime and funded opposition groups to Syria's Assad so that we had a stake in the game and
we had been planning and planting seeds of combustion in Syria for decades? Our cup runneth over now since we'd managed to foster chaos in the Middle East for decades, and
ISIS is the direct result of CIA actions as even Julian Assange had once explained.
So, in summation, not only do we need an adversarial press, we need a public that is aware and able to have
all relevant information from the press, which can only happen if the press rises above partisan politics and seriously does investigative journalism as it's been intended to do as the fourth estate. I want the truth, especially the inconvenient ones. And I want it from the press specific to every single administration that goes into the White House. Our collective futures are at stake when that doesn't happen and then also the futures of those generations still to come.
Peace.
