Thursday, February 16, 2017

Donald Trump's Press Conference and PewDiePie's New Video. Common Problem, Liberal Fake Media

Donald Trump gave a press conference that lasted about an hour and seventeen minutes on Thursday, February 16th, 2017. He allowed reporters to ask multiple questions and even follow-up questions. The emphasis, of course, was on the reported White House and/or security community illegal leaks to the press and also how biased the mainstream media is. It was a contentious press conference. Trump is not a very well polished guy when it comes to being an orator but he is apparently very honest. And entertaining. Many members of the press core, including Kristen Welker of NBC, tried to keep their faces straight for the camera when he would make jokes that they would normally laugh at. Media members attempting to hide their positive emotion towards Trump underlines his whole argument about the “very fake news” media.

One thing that Trump said which stumped them was “the leaks are real but the news is fake.” A person from the media in the crowd asked him to explain that statement. Trump basically said that although the sequences of events that leak may be true, the media’s reporting on it is false because of the *way* they report it. Here is a general example. Story A comes out about Trump and it’s positive. But the media puts so much of a negative spin and bias on it, they report on it and word it in a way to where it becomes a different story altogether. Story A has become Story B. Even though at the core of each story, the same facts remain, the public perception of what the leak was to what the reported story has become is different. 

PewDiePie has a similar situation. He is the biggest YouTuber on the platform with over 53 million subscribers. His brand of content is centered around tweens and is mostly silly in nature. The media doesn’t seem to like him too much, however, and they display their disdain for him in the articles they write. This relationship has been an issue since it was revealed that PewDiePie makes millions of dollars per year off of YouTube. New media being hated on by legacy media. It all came to a head when a few journalists from a publication decided to do some digging into his video catalogue to find “racist” and “anti-semitic” things. They published their findings in a highly biased article, then left YouTube and Disney to make a decision about their partnership with PewDiePie going forward. That decision was to cancel a “YouTube Red” series featuring PewDiePie and it called for Disney to cancel their sponsorship with him.

At the end of the day, these are two men from two totally different worlds with a couple of things in common. They are successful and the media doesn’t like it.