“In this cycle, I’ve started to see more Republican candidates avoiding the press, blocking the press from events, and taking advantage of the fact that there is conservative media that will ask different questions and has a different audience,” he said. “And to be honest, an interview with one of those websites might get more views from the people who vote in a Republican primary than interview with me.”
“So I’m obviously not saying to the world, ‘Stop talking to the media,'” he added. “I’m saying, just objectively, there is a media infrastructure built up so that you don’t need, if you’re a Republican candidate, to talk to us.”
In other words, this is the outcome of a long-growing conservative media ecosystem. As the Republican base increasingly gets their news primarily from right-leaning news outlets they agree with, Republican candidates will increasingly grant access primarily to friendly right-leaning news outlets, meaning there are fewer and fewer outlets who can provide a broad view of what’s going on in American politics.
Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist and CNN commentator, agrees and says that in deciding whether to do an interview, there’s always a cost/benefit analysis. And what is the benefit, he asked, of doing a potentially adversarial interview with an outlet you think is biased anyway?
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