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Will the White House Cancel ‘As the Trump World Turns’? - The New York Times

posted onMay 14, 2017
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Article snippet: This was a blockbuster week for the White House press briefing, already daytime television’s big new hit. Now the question is if the show gets renewed. Its most avid viewer, President Trump, casually floated the notion on Friday that the briefings — a Washington ritual for decades — had finally jumped the shark. “Just don’t have ’em,” the president said in an interview with Fox News, addressing the sharp criticism he and his press team received after this week’s chaotic rollout of the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. “Or else I have one every two weeks and I do them myself.” It was not quite clear whether Mr. Trump was making a serious proposal or, yet again, poking the eye of his nettlesome press corps. And while the idea may have piqued the interest of some network executives — Mr. Trump, after all, makes for good TV — it quickly drew further criticism. “That wld be wrong,” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a Republican, wrote on Twitter in a pointed response to Mr. Trump’s proposal. “Even We in Senate follow those briefings.” The White House Correspondents’ Association issued a blunt riposte. “Doing away with briefings would reduce accountability, transparency, and the opportunity for Americans to see that, in the U.S. system, no political figure is above being questioned,” the group’s president, Jeff Mason of Reuters, wrote. Then there was the hand-wringing from media critics about whether the briefings, which have been carried live on cable ... Link to the full article to read more

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