Any worthwhile reporter doesn’t want to be friendly w/ Trump and his toadies

There are times when I think one of my professional strengths is that personally, I’m an anti-social sort of individual.

TRUMP: He wants to be worshipped

I can be rude and pushy when need be, and I certainly don’t get offended when a person whom I deal with in my work as a reporter-type person decides they didn’t like something I wrote.

IT’S AN OCCUPATIONAL hazard that there are going to be people who are going to take offense to the notion that you’d bother to report something they’d just as soon downplay. Personally, I’ve lost count of the number of government-type geeks who have told me they’d never speak to me again!

For what it’s worth, most of them got over whatever caused them to have a tantrum in the first place. And for the ones who really did cut me off, I found they were usually the ones so interested in feeding me nothing but political “spin” that I was better off not hearing from them anymore.

They really didn’t have anything worth saying in the first place. Which some might argue applies just as much to President Donald Trump.

These thoughts have been running through my mind in recent days, as some people seem determined to make an issue out of the post-election hissy fit that Trump had in dealing with a CNN broadcaster.

THE REALITY IS that I suspect Trump was eager to want to dump all over someone that day. Election 2018 results weren’t a total loss for Trump, but they also revealed that a certain segment of our society continues to think of “the Donald” as an insipid buffoon.

And there’s nothing more that Trump thinks he has a right to demand of the American people than our eternal respect. As in we all should kneel before him – just like in that “Superman” movie where “General Zod” forces the U.S. president in the Oval Office to pledge loyalty to him.

I suspect Trump watched that film all those years ago, thought it a cool bit, and then figured Zod would kneel before he and all his money!

So should the reporter take Trump’s rant the least bit seriously? It was so staged by him that I think it shows all the more how unfit for political office he truly is.

WHEN I HEAR people try to make an issue of it, and whether or not a reporter was disrespectful toward our national “commander in chief,” I can’t help but snicker.

it is all pure theater meant to play to those ideologues who are the outspoken minority who cheer on his every idiotic comment on just about every issue.

I couldn’t help but snicker when I received in my daily e-mail load the latest poll being taken by the Trumpsters – asking us if we approve of the presidential behavior in all this issue. But going so far as to tell us outright that, “President Trump will NOT put up with the media’s liberal bias and utter disrespect for this Administration.”

This quickie poll by Trump will be as ludicrous as all the previous ones he has taken where he asks people if they merely approve of his job performance, or if they absolutely admire him.

THAT LINE ABOUT Trump not liking bias and utter disrespect truly shows the man has no clue about what is going on. Here’s the blunt truth – a reporter-type is going to refuse to be submissive toward anyone in a position of power; which us what Trump thinks he's entitled to. Anybody who thinks that’s the way it ought to be is being downright ridiculous, if not un-American.

I don’t know of any government official at any level or of any political party who thinks the reporter-types they encounter are “friends.” I don’t know of any serious reporter-type who’d want to be too friendly with government officials.

If anything, Trump needs to learn that questions about his policies aren’t personal. It’s informational, and the impression he gives off with his behavior (and making an issue of revoking access to the White House, even though I know many reporter-types who think White House access is oh so overrated) is of a sniveling, whiny child.

Butch and Woim -- Trump's idea of a great America?

With the people who want to support him coming across as toadies overly-anxious to be aligned with the schoolyard bully. Think of the old “Little Rascals” film shorts, with Trump as bully “Butch” and his supporters being the equivalent of “Woim.” Is that really the image we want for our society?

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DNAinfo.com ‘death’ in Chgo, NY shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone

As a reporter-type person who has experienced unemployment on several occasions, I sympathize with the DNAInfo.com website in Chicago and the individuals who earlier this week abruptly learned they were out of work.

RICKETTS: Owned Cubs/media pair less than Tribune Co.

Although there’s nothing at all surprising about the fact that the company operating websites in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington – along with Chicago – decided to suddenly ‘pack it in’ after eight years of trying to cover news in those cities.

JOE RICKETTS, THE head of the wealthy family that owns the no-longer-defending World Champion Chicago Cubs and also was a significant financial backer of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential bid (the family nearly got a member appointed to a Cabinet post), let it be known he was giving up because the business end was failing.

The company wasn’t generating enough revenue to cover the expenses of actually having people on the payroll to cover the news – which is an essential expense if one is going to cover the news properly.

Various reports have pointed out the fact that the employees connected to the websites in New York voted last week to organize themselves as a labor union. Some would have us believe that Ricketts’ decision to shut down was purely a response to not wanting to deal with organized labor.

Which may be true. But the idea that management would rather not have their employees sticking together to negotiate benefits for all is nothing new. The idea of an owner hating organized labor shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody!

Two local websites that are now ...

SO I’M NOT about to join the parade of Ricketts bashers, some of whom are even insisting that we boycott Chicago Cubs games in response to his anti-labor actions. I would never expect him to be sympathetic, and I personally certainly don’t need this as a reason to ignore the Cubs – a ballclub I have never much cared for.

What I take personally from the DNAInfo.com closings is evidence of how costly it can be to professionally report the news. And how those people who are eager to see newspapers and their centuries of experience in doing so (the Chicago Sun-Times is a baby, tracing its origins back to the days just before Pearl Harbor) wither away are truly ridiculous in their attitudes.

There are those people deluded enough to believe there is no loss to society from fewer newspapers because the Internet and websites are capable of replacing them.

... a part of Chicago's media history

Yet most websites I have seen that are news-oriented are way too reliant on having newspapers to generate stories and content in general that they can appropriate for their own use.

A SITE LIKE DNAInfo.com, which actually had reporters looking for stories in the neighborhoods of Chicago (some neighborhoods were covered more thoroughly than others) that was generating its own content is running into the same problems as those who historically were disseminating their content on printed pages of pulp.

Which means most of these sites wind up becoming the medium of choice for benefactors with the finances to not care about their financial bottom line.

Even then, there comes a point when many of them have to cut off the funding and shut down. Remember the ProgressIllinois.com website, which had reporter-type people out-and-about covering stories – with the bills being paid by the Service Employees International Union?

Even they had to give in – with the website remaining in place, but un-updated since that final date. AP: Donald Trump Wins Presidential Election (UPDATED) is the final headline, as though determined to perpetually remind us all of the annoyance our society brought upon itself just over a year ago.

Sun-Times still reporting news, despite death predictions.

THERE IS ONE significant difference between the two closings – DNAInfo.com and its sister websites suddenly found all their content erased from the Internet. A letter from Ricketts explaining his decision to suddenly shut down (and make the four months of vacation pay and severance his reporters will receive seem overly generous) is all that remains of the sites.

There is some speculation Ricketts may try to archive some of the content – for those who care to see what once was of this particular attempt at covering the news.

Although as anyone who follows the “news” is fully aware, yesterday’s stories are ancient history. It’s the ongoing developments that provide for an overall report that has relevance to people’s lives.

And without it, we as a society may have to get used to a condition in which our attempts at public “education” may wind up being fulfilled with cutesy pictures of kitty cats, quirky pictures of people doing something stupid, and all the porn, porn, porn we could ever desire.

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Government meddling in other people’s business way too headache-inducing!

One of the reasons why I personally would never contemplate running for electoral office is the fact that I’d get stuck taking the blame for the screw-ups of other officials beneath me.

OBAMA: Does the president feel ...

While it may well be true that a public official is responsible for those who answer to him, I can’t help but wonder how much of the Tylenol Barack Obama is consuming these days.

FOR ONE RIGHT on top of the other, a pair of stories have cropped up that would have us think that Obama deserves to be thought of in the same class of people as J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon – if not Joe McCarthy (not the Yankees manager version) himself.

The ideologues are getting all worked up over recent Washington Post reports about how the Internal Revenue Service was giving extra scrutiny to certain groups claiming tax-exempt status.

None of the groups ultimately was denied that status, but it seems they resented having so much attention paid to them. Particularly since many are politically-motivated groups whose desire is to promote candidates who push their conservative ideological thoughts on issues.

We’re hearing the screaming that the government is out to get them – although coming from these ideologues, I wonder if what they’re really upset about is that anyone would have the nerve to “scrooten” them (remember Mayor Daley, the second?).

MAYBE IT’S ONLY okay when their opposition is the one facing the scrutiny from the government?

Now I don’t mean to downplay the concept of the government turning into “big brother” and deciding to meddle into the private affairs of people. It is a serious problem, and Obama himself quickly joined in the gaggle of people criticizing the IRS.

Although I suspect he’s more upset about the fact that everybody on the ideological spectrum against him is going to blame this on him. He’s going to have to take the heat for this – particularly when the sympathetic leadership of the House of Representatives decides to hold hearings to give those voices a microphone and television camera to amplify their thoughts all the moreso.

... something more like this these days?

But what makes it worse is that this has to crop up in the public ear at the same time that the Justice Department decides it has to resort to reporter-harassment in order to advance its criminal investigations.

THAT’S WHAT IS usually behind any incident where prosecutors decide they need to go after a reporter-type person’s notes or telephone records – they are unable to figure out a case by themselves, even though they have subpoena power.

In this case, the Associated Press learned that federal prosecutors had managed to get records of about 20 telephone lines – both at AP offices and, in some cases, the home telephone and personal cellphone lines of reporters.

It seems that a Central Intelligence Agency disruption of a plot to bomb an airliner became known, and someone was upset enough to want to punish someone – most likely whoever let it be known to reporter-types that this was going on.

Personally, I can appreciate how someone might be offended by having prosecutorial-minded people wading through lists of places one called on their telephone. Although if anyone tried subpoenaing my home phone records, all they’d really get is a list of which restaurants I patronize for carryout food.

BUT THERE’S THE greater principle at stake about some respect for privacy – which I suspect the ideologues facing what they see as harassment from the IRS oftentimes are not willing to respect for others.

It is why I am less than sympathetic – even though we may well have IRS agents who stepped across the line of decency in their investigatorial behavior. And a president wondering what he ever did so bad in life to deserve all the harassment he gets dumped on him on a daily basis!

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