Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway says U.S. President Donald Trump is affecting not only the stock markets around the world, but is also having a unique effect on the media — in particular, on social media — despite the difference between the way the media is treating this president so far, as opposed to the way they treated his predecessor.
Conway told Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity in an interview late Monday night (Jan. 23), “It would be nice to see people show respect for the Office of the President and its current occupant, and give him a chance to do right by the American people.” Nevertheless, she said, despite all that, the “Trump Effect” is alive and well.
Hannity noted that President Trump asked people at the Freedom Ball whether he should “keep tweeting. “This is a different era,” Hannity remarked, noting the huge number of followers attracted by those tweets.
“That’s the Trump Effect,” Conway said.
“You have talk radio, you have Instagram, you have Twitter, you have Facebook, you have the ability to bypass the media,” Hannity pointed out, with an obvious jab at journalists who have been less than positive in their coverage of the new Trump Administration.
“He has 45 million followers combined on those,” Conway interjected.
“That’s a lot more than me,” Hannity grinned. “I think I have five.”
He followed up with a question about whether the hostility of pro-Clinton media would eventually prompt the White House senior advisers to consider banishing some journalists from the briefing room.
Conway nixed that idea, saying she has a “pretty good relations” with the media, “At least I think so…and I think we have to have a free and open press.” She added that as she sees it, “This White House and the media are going to share joint custody of this nation for eight years and we ought to be able to figure out how to co-parent and mutually co-exist.”
Convincing a media pool to produce objective coverage, however, has long been a problem for politicians.
Sean Hannity visited the State of Israel during Operation Protective Edge, the IDF counter-terrorism war in the summer of 2014 against the Hamas terrorist organization that rules Gaza.
He graced the nation’s capital with a special Fox News program broadcast from Jerusalem.