The Briefing by Sean Spicer

Author:Sean Spicer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

I had found my footing—many friends told me approvingly after the press briefing, “That’s the Sean Spicer I know”—but I still faced a media that reported rumor as fact and put stories about alleged, White House palace intrigue ahead of substantive reporting about policy.

I got a taste of this before I had even left the RNC. Just before Christmas 2016, the RNC put out a statement: “Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.”

The big tent of the RNC includes people from just about every religion. We routinely issued religious tidings, extending our best wishes to Jewish Americans at Passover, to Muslim Americans at Ramadan, and so on.

And yet, this time heads exploded on social media and cable news.

Jonathan Chait, a writer for New York magazine, tweeted: “The distinction between a president and a king is not trivial.”

MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin said, “No joke—This line is actually in the RNC’s Christmas message.”4

“I hope you are kidding,” I replied when asked by BuzzFeed about whether Donald Trump was the “King” in question. “Christ is the King in the Christian faith,” I replied. “To ask this on Christmas is frankly offensive.” Ben Smith, BuzzFeed editor in chief and a veteran of Politico, took to Twitter to stand by BuzzFeed’s “reporting.”

Over the years, I have experienced many spats with reporters and media outlets, but this disagreement at Christmastime was a new low.

This was just the beginning of a landslide of negative media coverage. Over a three-month period in the following year, the conservative Media Research Center found that coverage of President Trump was 91 percent negative.5 In an analysis of the media coverage of Trump’s first one hundred days as president, a paper from the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School noted, “Trump has received unsparing coverage for most weeks of his presidency, without a single major topic where Trump’s coverage, on balance, was more positive than negative, setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.” It went on:

Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity. Of news reports with a clear tone, negative reports outpaced positive ones by 80 percent to 20 percent. Trump’s coverage was unsparing. In no week did the coverage drop below 70 percent negative and it reached 90 percent negative at its peak . . . .The best period for Trump was week 12 of his presidency, when he ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase in retaliation for the Assad regime’s use of nerve gas on civilians. That week, his coverage divided 70 percent negative to 30 percent positive. Trump’s worst periods were weeks 3 and

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