It also is real hard to argue against if you actually talk about what DT has in mind: if you do, you look like you’re clinging to your Special Status and keeping all the other kids out of the room — hardly a noble goal.

“He did not ignore the media: on the contrary, he probably granted too many interviews for his own good, and carted journalists around on a dedicated press plane for months.

On the contrary: they ignored him.

When I joined the traveling press corps for the last few weeks of the campaign, I was surprised by how little interest there was among many of the journalists in covering what was actually going on at the rallies we were shlepping 20 hours per day to attend. Most were cordial, and professional; a few were exceptionally hard-working. But in general, the story of the 2016 election had long since ceased to be of any great interest to them….
The rules of the traveling press corps, repeated every few days for the benefit of new arrivals, was that whatever was said or done within the group was strictly off the record. That allowed journalists to preserve a necessary privacy. But it also meant that if some journalists decided together to frame a Trump speech in a particular way – something, arguably, the public had a right to know that they were doing – there was no way to report that.

Again – most of the journalists I met were professional, and friendly. But I was surprised at how few of them ventured beyond the “pen” and into the crowd, how much time was spent on Twitter at Trump rallies rather than listening to real, live, flesh-and-blood Trump supporters. …
The night before the election, after a rally in New Hampshire, journalists both inside and outside the traveling press seemed less interested in the fact that Trump had made an explicit appeal to the “working class” than that he had presented a letter of support from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, which the media spent the rest of the night speculating was a fake.

Many journalists apparently believed it was their civic duty to protect the public from Trump. Some worked for publications, like Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post, that had clear anti-Trump editorial policies or disclaimers. On occasion, mainstream media reports of events I attended bore no resemblance to what had actually happened – such as when NBC turned a happy speech in Las Vegas in Dec. 2015 into a kind of Nuremberg Nazi rally.

But even that was less problematic than the general lack of curiosity about what Trump was saying to voters and whether he was reaching them. Journalists – and their editors – were so busy talking, they forgot to listen. …”

And yet again, Arnold said it best, many many years ago…