Listen as Larry spoke to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer about President Trump’s speech at CPAC, his control over the media and more during CPAC.
During the interview, Secretary Sean Spicer addressed the media’s frenzy surrounding the White House media gaggle:
O’Connor: Apparently, you are picking and choosing who gets to participate in a gaggle. The New York Times, Politico, CNN, you told them they couldn’t talk to you. What are you doing there?
Secretary Spicer: Here’s the situation. We have a briefing quite often as many people have seen…
O’Connor: Most people? Are you kidding me? You’re getting better ratings than, ‘Day of Our Lives’.
Secretary Spicer: I’m getting Larry O’Connor kind of ratings.
O’Connor: Exactly!
Secretary Spicer: From time to time we bring folks into my office and there is a pool which is set up by the White House Correspondents Association. We brought the pool in which is a group of representatives from the print, the broadcast, radio, online. That transcript of the entire thing is made available to all members of the White House Correspondents Association, all two or three thousand of them, whatever it is. Literally it is all recorded, transcribed for them and pushed out for the entire press corps. But unfortunately, I don’t have an office that can accommodate all hundreds of them so…
O’Connor: So this was a size of office issue?
Secretary Spicer: But the radio pool was invited, the print pool, the television pool. And I get that there is this sense of elitism that everyone from the mainstream media gets to decide who comes in every time, that’s just not how it works. We have events everyday where the pool gets to be let in and in some cases we let additional members in depending upon the situation. But to suggest that we follow the protocol here of bringing the pool in and representing every one of the different mediums that they set themselves and then we ask some additional outlets to join us. The media does a great job of making it all about them and in this case it truly is less about the access we give and information and more about whether or not they get to ask their snarky question on any given day.
[…]
O’Connor: It’s like there are two different worlds right now. When you hear the stories that they’re obsessed with, the media, and the questions that you’re hearing in the briefing room versus the stuff that you hear from real citizens and real Americans like what you saw at CPAC. Is this a new phenomenon to you, or do you think this is a typical thing heightened under a Trump Presidency?
Secretary Spicer: You know I think it’s heightened a little but I don’t think it’s that different. I think that, especially when it comes to conservative thought that, there is always this, there’s a group of folks that live in a bubble inside the beltway who have one set of thoughts and they are surrounded by people who have the same thought and they don’t recognize or understand that there is an entirely different view, or competing views rather, that are throughout the country. I think that if you live in the District that voted 95 to 5 for Democrats last cycle, it’s hard when your neighbor and everyone else believes one thing and you don’t understand the challenges, frustrations, concerns that people in Montana, South Carolina, New Hampshire, throughout the country. They surround themselves with people who think like themselves and then all they do is ask questions to each other and think like each other instead of frankly understanding the challenges. But again this media obsession here is with themselves. It’s all about them. It’s all about their ability to do what they want and they get whatever their agenda is forward. They really have lost touch with the concerns of the average American.
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