White House refused to play with CNN

“We’re sending surrogates to places where we think it makes sense to promote our agenda,” said a White House official, acknowledging that CNN is not such a place, but adding that the ban is not permanent.

A CNN reporter, speaking on background, was more blunt: The White House is trying to punish the network and force down its ratings.

“They’re trying to cull CNN from the herd,” the reporter said.

Totalitarians need your complicity. It gives them legitimacy. Refuse to acknowledge their legitimacy. Reject them utterly and you shatter their system. The media is a system that depends on complicity. It's a left-wing echo chamber, but it still expects Republicans to show up for the occasional round of attacks and smears. This manufactures the illusion of media relevance.

President Trump is refusing to play with CNN.

CNN needs them on the air because it needs to be seen as influential and relevant. Without White House people, it's just MSNBC with better groomed and more articulate anchors. It's just an echo chamber.

And that is what CNN and the rest of the media is. But they don't want to be seen as such. It destroys their legitimacy and forces them to compete for the same narrow slice of the left-wing pie. That's fine if you're creating niche programming for Netflix or HBO, but doesn't work nearly as well when you're competing with a whole bunch of outlets of what used to be a national press.

That's how FOX already the media's lunch. And the last thing CNN wants is to be fighting over the last leftie with MSNBC.

Administration officials are still answering the questions of CNN reporters and White House press secretary Sean Spicer is still calling on CNN at briefings. But the last time an administration official appeared on the news network was January 11, when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway was on Anderson Cooper’s show, Politico says. That was the same day that Trump blew up on CNN reporter Jim Acosta at his first and only press conference as a president-elect.

As New York previously reported, the drama between CNN and Trump goes back to the president’s relationship with network head Jeff Zucker, who Trump believes has personally betrayed him.

Trump’s tiff with CNN recalls the tense relationship between Fox News and the Obama administration, which came to a head in 2009. While the White House never froze out Fox, it did try to leave the network out of certain interviews, which drew protests from the other TV news networks. Obama’s choice of invective against Fox News — “operating, basically, as a talk-radio format” — was also not quite as pointed as Trump’s repeated cries of CNN being “fake news.”./.