Trump Overwhelms the Media. With crack Media reporter/analyst, Oliver Darcy.
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
4.7 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Trump administration is issuing a steady stream of controversial executive orders that are testing Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. This "flooding the zone with shit" strategy is making it difficult for the media to keep up and provide in-depth coverage. Today Bill speaks with leading Media Reporter, Oliver Darcy. Darcy, formerly with CNN, now writes the excellent daily newsletter, Status. Bill and Oliver discuss how the media is struggling to adequately cover and contextualize the Trump administration's actions, which range from pardoning Capitol rioters to making extreme claims about seizing control of Gaza. There are concerns that some media outlets are caving to pressure from the administration or the administration's allies.
Examples of the media's challenges include the Politico subscription scandal, the 60 Minutes lawsuit, and the Pentagon removing longstanding media outlets from their press corps. Darcy calls for the media to adopt a different approach, such as framing coverage as a "national crisis" and devoting more resources and airtime to these issues. Their discussion exposes the Trump administration's efforts to overwhelm and undermine the media, and spotlights the media's struggle to effectively cover and contextualize the administration's actions. Bill is a subscriber to Oliver’s newsletter and suggest you do as well. Go to Status.news to sign up.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, good friends, and welcome back to the Bill Presspot. |
| 0:10.0 | Good to see you. |
| 0:11.0 | Well, here we are beginning week four of Trump 2, with still a continuing clatter of new executive |
| 0:18.0 | orders signed almost every day, every one of them, it seems, testing the Congress, |
| 0:22.4 | the courts, and the Constitution, and some of them clearly against the law. The brazen overreach |
| 0:28.8 | of Trump's actions has stunned members of both parties in Congress, although only Democrats are |
| 0:34.5 | willing to say so publicly. And it's created, you know, a huge problem |
| 0:39.2 | for journalists who hardly have time to investigate and report one outrage before Trump's |
| 0:45.0 | dropped another one, which of course is exactly his purpose in flooding the zone. In fact, |
| 0:52.2 | for the media, covering Trump too has turned out to be even more challenging than covering |
| 0:57.9 | Trump 1, except, of course, for Fox News, which just repeats everything Trump says as gospel. |
| 1:05.6 | So how should journalists deal with the president whose views nothing but lies and misinformation. |
| 1:12.3 | One of our leading media critics today, Oliver Darcy, formerly with CNN and now author |
| 1:18.7 | of the Daily Newsletter Status, has some strong opinions on that subject, and he joins us |
| 1:24.8 | today to talk about it. Oliver Darcy, good to talk to you. Welcome back to the |
| 1:30.1 | Bill Press pod. Great to be here, Bill. And congratulations on the new newsletter, status. I'm a |
| 1:38.9 | subscriber and I learn a lot from it every day. I can't believe everything you cover. So I encourage |
| 1:44.0 | all of our listeners to check it out as well. I appreciate it. Tell us right away how people can find it. It's very easy. Status. Dot news is how you find it. Status. Dot news. You just type that into your browser and you can subscribe right there. And we have a free tier too. So anyone who's |
| 2:01.9 | interested in media, tech, politics, how they all intersect, I think they'd be interested |
| 2:07.2 | in this newsletter. All right. There you go. Now, let's start with some breaking news. Here we are, |
| 2:14.3 | Time magazine. Donald Trump said he didn't even know Time still existed, but it does. |
| 2:19.2 | And all that's covered this week at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office sits President Elon Musk. |
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