Sean Spicer, meet C.J. Cregg.

Like others suffering from both Trump and cable news melancholia, my spouse is bingeing on The West Wing via Netflix. Yesterday we were into Season Five and White House Press Secretary Cregg (Allison Janney) was so pissed with a Federal Communications ruling accelerating TV station consolidation that she made her anger known to one and all.

She yanked most of the seats out of the White House Briefing Room. She then told one rather startled newbie that she would hereby allow only one representative of a media corporation, including Fox and Tribune (she was most miffed at the FCC ruling’s impact on a fictional giant, MertMedia).

Now consider the actual hoopla these days over all the alleged upstarts jamming the real-life briefing room and actually being acknowledged by the Trump White House. Given the Cregg precedent, perhaps we could winnow down the current assemblage by virtue of not just corporate ownership but ideology---Breitbart or The Daily Caller, not both, or Slate or Mother Jones, not both—years of jobs experience, academic degrees or number of Twitter followers.

“If America’s choices are going to be restricted, so are yours,” Cregg says to that first reporter she runs into in newly chair-deprived briefing room, making clear there will be just the one seat apiece to each corporate biggie with multiple outlets under its financial purview.

Fortunately, fictional Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (the late John Spencer) had already told C.J. he thought this was foolish. Who are “the little guys” these days in media, anyway, he wonders. And this was just after the turn of the new century!

Well, responded the furious Cregg, the “people need to know” about big changes underway in the ownership and regulatory landscape. It prompted McGarry to tartly say, “That doesn’t mean we can stop them.”

Again, this was 13 years (Season 5, Episode 19) before the pending Time Warner-AT&T merger.

As for that $85 billion deal, don’t expect much Trump administration regulatory resistance, regardless of the anti-corporate declarations of then-candidate Trump. (The Hill)

Perhaps those comments had some basis in fact. But, as Leo warned C.J., it doesn’t mean you can stop them.

Flynn and the media speaking circuit

“Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn reported payments of at least $5,000 for a speaking engagement with the Kremlin-funded English language network RT, new documents released Saturday by the White House show, though Flynn didn’t originally include the payment when he first filed his ethics forms in January.” (Politico)

Take me out to the ball game

The start of baseball season brings tons of serious journalism, including Sunday’s New York Times piece on how priorities (pitching and hitting) have perhaps made today’s youth players lesser all-around players. There was also a big piece from The Associated Press on how “Oriole Park at Camden Yards became the model for a period of groundbreaking transformation in the way baseball venues were built.”

Yeah but...

By coincidence, when I ran the Chicago Tribune’s daily features section back then, Pulitzer Prize architecture critic Blair Kamin explored how it was that the same firm that designed Camden Yards created at the same time the very uninspired then-new stadium for the Chicago White Sox. (The Baltimore Sun)

When I asked him Sunday about the topic, he said, “Camden spawned lots of retro ballparks, some better than others (Cleveland and Pittsburgh good, St. Louis and Arlington, Texas not so much). It even led to a counter-retro trend, exemplified by San Diego’s Petco (or whatever they call it) Park.”