The media encountered an intentional news blackout at Mar-A-Lago yesterday. When reporters arrived at Trump’s Palm Beach resort to cover his golf outing with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, they found themselves in a press room whose windows and glass doors had been covered with black plastic material.

Presumably, the immediate intent of the visual blockade was to prevent the press from photographing Trump and Abe playing golf. It’s rather far-fetched to think that not allowing photos was a security measure: It’s golf. But it is plausible to conjecture that Trump just doesn’t want people to witness his ineptitude on the golf course or to see him cheating; or perhaps to take an unflattering photograph of him out of his customary baggy suits and overcoats and wearing, instead,  casual clothing that reveals more of his girth.

To add irony to an already absurd situation, photographers were advised to not take pictures of the covered windows and doors, because they were on “private property.” So, there was an attempted blackout of coverage of the blackout. Fortunately, some reporters did not obey.

The plastic-bag news blackout may, at first glance, seem like a bizarre act designed to protect Trump’s fragile ego. At first, it can strike you as a comical effort. It’s humorous, too, to think about the unfortunate Mar-A-Lago employee who was ordered to tape Hefty bags to the windows and glass doors, and what that person must have been thinking when he or she got the assignment.

But I think there’s more to it than that. By taking this action, Trump is literally — and probably inadvertently — showing us exactly how he wants to treat the press. He doesn’t like his actions made public. He wants to work behind closed doors, out of sight of the press and unaccountable to anyone. Public scrutiny that he doesn’t control doesn’t fit his unfettered-CEO view of what he should be able to do. He views First-Amendment press freedoms as an obstacle.

We’ve already seen the first steps toward limiting freedom of the press. Trump’s accusations of “fake news,” and his threats to “open up libel laws, ” and his repeated use of the term “dishonest” to characterize the press are leading indicators. He has threatened to revoke press credentials for newspapers and media outlets that challenge him or don’t “advance his agenda.”   His press secretary, Sean Spicer, is belligerent at press briefings, and, most recently has been giving priority to questions posed by reporters from news outlets considered friendly to the administration.

So as we chuckle at the comic clumsiness of trying to blindfold and shut out the press from a presidential golf outing, we need to remember that the plastic -bag news blackout is not a joke. It’s a physical manifestation of where we could be headed.

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The ACA [Obamacare] is alive and growing—and Year 2 of enrollment is going quite well, but you’d never know that if you get your news from the usual suspects: Mainstream media outlets have, essentially, put this story on blackout.

In October 2013, when the Affordable Care Act starting taking enrollments, everyone jumped all over the faulty healthcare.gov website and predicted disaster for the program. The reports of website screw-ups were right. But the predictions of catastrophic failure of the program were all wrong. And, by the end of the first open enrollment period, more than 7 million people had signed up, reducing the nation’s uninsured rate significantly.

According to Politico:

A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that 9.5 million fewer adults are uninsured now than at the beginning of the [first year ] Obamacare enrollment season. The Urban Institute’s Health Reform Monitoring Survey found a similar drop, with 8 million adults gaining coverage. And Gallup-Healthways survey reported that the uninsured rate has fallen to 13.4 percent of adults, the lowest level since it began tracking health coverage in 2008.

This year, open enrollment began on November 15, and, in contrast to Year 1, it’s going smoothly. Nearly 30 days into Year two, 1.3 million have signed up–of which about half are new enrollees. [Check out ACAsignups.com for in-depth, independent reporting and daily updates.] No major problems, nothing for ACA opponents to crow and gloat about. So, no news reports, even though anniversaries and one-year look-backs are standard news hooks, and even though the contrast with Year 1 is a legitimate story.

This year, there’s no disaster, no right-wing talking points—just success. Nobody is feeding anti-Obamacare press releases to the media, nobody’s trumping up failure stories to run on Fox News. So, the mainstream media is yawning. Apparently, the success of a program pushed by President Obama—and beneficial to millions of Americans—is not a news story.

The absence of reporting on this year’s ACA enrollments is indicative of a couple of things, I think. First, it demonstrates how much influence the Republican propaganda machine has had on mainstream news: With no major anti-ACA propaganda push this year, there’s simply no news. Hmmm.

Second—and this is the positive part of the story—the lack of reporting on the successful second-year rollout may simply indicate that Obamacare is quickly becoming a fact of life in this country—accepted by millions of people, viewed as a beneficial government program, and becoming more popular as people understand how it works and what it can do for them and their families. I still contend, though, that this phenomenon is, in itself, a news story that merits attention,

I can see why the media has lost interest—it doesn’t bleed, and it’s working. Ho hum, I guess.

The only ACA storyline that continues to be of interest to the media is the frivolous Supreme Court case—spitefully filed by the Republican Party—that pounces on a drafting error in the law, regarding federal subsidies for ACA enrollees. Unfortunately, the media is not reporting the case as the mean-spirited, who-cares-if-millions-of-people-suffer, purely political, anti-Obama maneuver that it is. It will be news because it’s nasty and confrontational, and because the right-wing will make it easy to report by supplying talking points that can be read verbatim.

It’s a sad and shameful state of affairs.

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The Mayor’s office in NYC responded to accusations of mass arrests of reporters during Occupy Wall Street protests by stating that only five of the 26 reporters arrested were “credentialed by the city.” It seemed to have gone right over the spokesman’s head that he was confessing to the city having arrested five reporters for the crime of reporting a story that the city was uncomfortable with. To be clear, it is not uncommon for fully legitimate reporters to work in NYC without having been credentialed by the city, so it is likely that the count is higher than five, even if a few of the persons self-identifying as reporters were not actually “legitimate” journalists (whatever that means).

Right now, the mainstream media (MSM) has not been giving a lot of coverage to the current challenge to the media’s right to report stories without being subject to arrest.  This is hardly surprising, given the American media’s lack of interest in covering the hard-hitting expose-style stories. This may be part of the explanation for the sharper decrease in newspaper sales in the US vs. Europe. Both are well developed industrial markets that attribute the loss of readership to newer technologies luring away the younger readership. What is really different is the willingness of the European media to take on hard-hitting news stories, and pay experienced reporters to travel the world and write the stories. Much of the best reporting on events in the Middle East and beyond is coming from European reporters and newspapers.

During the Occupy Wall Street protests, there has been little mention of the hypocrisy involved in condemning the violent oppression of demonstrators overseas, while using some of the same methods within the US. You know that something is wrong with how the media is working when a conservative commenter at Forbes magazine, who has spent time and ink criticizing the OWS protests, speaks out against the police tactics used at Berkeley before much of the MSM finds its voice in the matter.

Looking at who owns the media tells us why it is so slow to criticize elements that are set up to protect the 1% of the nation that controls finances in America – those same interests control the media! We are now used to turning to news programs and seeing extensive time spent on stories about celebrities such as the Kardashians, the Hiltons, etc… As this is written, the day after thousands of protesters interfered with normal operations of Wall Street and tied up bridges and landmarks in NYC, along with cooperative events in dozens of cities across the country, CNN’s web site’s lead story is the continuing scandal at Penn State. Whatever we think of the state of college sports, it cannot be mistaken as a story that will change the average American’s life.

Even if we ignore the worst offenders, such as Fox News, it is widely acknowledged that American media acts as a stenographer for those in power. As major corporations spin the story of their involvement in the real estate mortgage collapse, the media has been faithfully reporting their version of affairs. Even when the media does try to focus in on financial malfeasance, it often gets the story wrong, claiming that the Government spends $16 for a muffin, when it turns out that was the price for a whole breakfast at the Hilton, missing the bigger stories in the process. It is much easier to try and play “gotcha” journalism than it is to tell the difficult story of what is really going on with corporate influence in our nation.

One of the most important stories for the average American is climate change. Rather than giving the facts on what science says about climate change, the American media continues to cover the story as if it were two sides debating the meaning of the evidence. The reality is that science has long ago come to the conclusion that climate change is real and caused by human action, but this story might be discomfiting to the corporate overlords of the media. We can expect continued misreporting on issues that corporate America has an interest in.

So, if the average American cannot trust the corporate media, what should he/she do to stay informed? There are good alternatives. For foreign affairs, Al Jazeera and the BBC do excellent reporting, as does The Guardian out of London. To know what is going on politically within the US, independent media such as Democracy Now and Truthout are good options. For environmental news, keeping up to date with Greenpeace and other environmental groups will let you know what is really going on. It is more work than just watching a single news show, or reading the local paper, but if you want to know about the important issues that affect our lives, the only reliable method is to do the research yourself. The reason the American Main Stream Media is collapsing is that the quality is just no longer there, and it no longer has the guts to even cover its own demise.

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