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Neal Urwitz Published 4:02 p.m. ET Jan. 22, 2017 | Updated 11 hours ago

President Donald Trumps counselor Kellyanne Conway said White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer used alternative facts when he falsely called the crowds at Trumps swearing-in ceremony the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration." Time

In Times Square on Jan. 20, 2017.(Photo: Mary Altaffer, AP)

Since Donald Trump upended everything we thought we knew about politics, hands have been wrung and ink has been spilled about the "post-factual age." How could the candidate with the worstPolitifactrating in the 2016 campaign come out on top? How could fake news causea man to shoot up a pizzeriain a quiet Washington neighborhood?How could the Trump administration claim its new press secretary was using "alternative facts"?

Do facts still matter and if they dont, will real journalism stay relevant? Or is the lamestream media a relic?

We shouldnt overreact. Now that President Trump has taken the oath of office and the business of governance has begun, the impact of fake news and alternative outlets will be revealed as vastly overblown. Traditional media will still control the national conversation. Policymakers will still have to build their days around what the mainstream media reports. The scandals,conflictsand reality checks the mainstream press unearths will dominate the headlines, as they didjust before the inauguration. Those of fake news sites will not.

Lets start with the numbers. Infowars, which received tremendous attention as a haven for conspiracy theories during the campaign, has about 6 millionunique monthly visitors. Breitbarthad roughly19 millionin October2016 when interest in the presidential campaign was peaking.

The USA TODAY NETWORK,on the other hand,hadmore than 122 millionunique visitors in November.CNN's monthly average is about 105 million. The Washington Postand The New York Times, meanwhile, rose to about 100 million apiece just before the election. It is hard to deny that mainstream media outlets reach a huge swath of Americas news consumers.

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Its not just the sheer numbers, though its also who reads which outlets.Politicopolledcongressional staffersand lobbyists on what they read,and the results were no surprise. Among the most read wereThe Wall Street Journal,The Washington Post,The Hill,Roll Calland, of course,Politicoitself. Most congressional offices also read their hometown papers religiously.

People working in Washingtons other policymaking centers like the Department of Defense or the Department of Education read large national publications. They also read outlets that focus on their respective industries, such asDefense NewsandEducation Week, and those mainstream trade publications matter.Education Week,for instance, has 1.1 millionunique monthly visitors, and you can bet the people crafting federal regulatory interpretations take their stories seriously.

As forsites like Infowars, "credible people cannot cite them and remain credible, at least not with policymakers. Former Georgia congressmanJack Kingston, for instance, tweeted a link to an Infowars story.A reporter from themainstream The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionand conservatives from across the countrylambastedhim for it, and Kingston deleted the tweet in an hour. If citing an outlet can shame a former member of Congress, let alone a current one, it is fair to say that outlets impact on the national policy conversation will be limited at best.

Finally, few things control the national conversation like a scandal, but the scandal must have some grounding in fact in order to matter. Fact-based scandals dominated the conversation around the campaign, whether it wasClintons emails orTrumps locker room talk aboard theAccess Hollywoodbus. That is all the more true while a president is in office. Consider how the Clinton administrations legislative agenda groundto a halt during the MonicaLewinsky scandal, or how the George W. Bush Administrations political capital evaporated following the botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

POLICING THE USA:Alook at race, justice, media

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The scandals unearthed by alternative outlets dont have the same impact. For instance, when Alex Jones reported that Hillary Clinton was a devil worshipper, the Clinton campaign, to put it mildly, did not feel compelled to offer a denial. The next four years will doubtlessly see unreliable news outlets produce hundreds of "scandals," none of which will have much effect on Americas governance.

Yes, people are sharing fake news through Facebook and Twitter. People are increasingly using social media platforms to receive news through a filter bubble, where they will only end up reading the news and opinions they already agree with, regardless of whether those facts are actually true. In the long run, that will bepoisonousto our nation, convincing everyone that their own opinions are infallible and the opposition is at best stupid or at worst evil.

None of that, however, precludes the traditional media from playing a critical role in the governance of the United States. Even in the post-factual age, when fake news proliferates and fringe conspiracies creep into online interactions, the lamestream media will still control the national conversation. Facts still matter.

Neal Urwitz is director of external relations at the Center for a New American Security.

You can readdiverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers ontheOpinion front page,on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter.To submit a letter, comment or column, check oursubmission guidelines.

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By ALEXIS MYERS, Associated Press 3:53 p.m. PT Jan. 19, 2017

Jaxon Owens, 17, right, editor-in-chief of the Viking Vanguard student newspaper at Puyallup High School, speaks during a Senate hearing at the Capitol Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, in Olympia, Wash. Washington state lawmakers are reintroducing a bill that would protect student journalists' free speech in school-sponsored media at public schools and colleges in response to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave administrators control over what gets published in school media. Owens spoke in favor of the measure.(Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) Amid a national push, Washington state lawmakers are reintroducing a bill that would protect student journalists' free speech in school-sponsored media at public schools and colleges.

Washington could become one of about a dozen states that have passed similar legislation in response to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave administrators control over what gets published in school media.

Senate Bill 5064, introduced by Republican Sen. Joe Fain, would designate school media as "public forums for expression" and make students responsible for determining content so long as it is not slanderous or libelous, unjustly invades privacy, violates federal or state law or encourages students to break school rules or commit crimes.

"It's about expanding the culture of freedom of speech and freedom of the press so that more students have an appreciation of that early on," Fain said. "Beyond that, we need watchdogs."

Under the measure, student media advisers also could not be terminated, transferred or otherwise disciplined for refusing to censor student journalists.

"I want to bring more attention to why it is important to go into journalism, and why it's important to do that job really well," Fain said. "And, the best way you can do that job well is when you are trained to do that job and to shoulder the responsibility of doing it well from the get-go."

Fain, alongside 13 other state lawmakers, listened to public testimony for the bill Thursday.

Jaxon Owens, a 17-year-old senior at Puyallup High School, testified in support in front of the Early Learning & K-12 Education Committee.

Sen. Joe Fain, R-Auburn, right, listens to testimony during a Senate hearing at the Capitol Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, in Olympia, Wash. Fain is reintroducing a bill that would protect student journalists' free speech in school-sponsored media at public schools and colleges in response to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave administrators control over what gets published in school media.(Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)

Owens, the editor-in-chief of the Viking Vanguard student newspaper, told The Associated Press his principal reviews almost every issue before it gets published.

"He just kind of flips through it to make sure that everything is OK," he said. "We do an intense vetting process in everything we do no matter if it's print, web or social media."

Owens said if the bill passes, "I really doubt we will abuse it. But we will continue to strive and grow as journalists and grow to our full potential as writers and as young, competent men and women."

Jerry Bender of the Association of Washington School Principals opposed the bill, but only for high school students. He says it is a "student safety issue."

Bender, who served as a principal for 10 years at Centralia High School, said he believes college students have mastered the craft well enough that they don't need as much supervision, but a high school publication should be reviewed. "If I am going to be there when the plane crashes, I'd like to be there when it takes off," he said.

In an interview with AP, Bender mentioned a case where the "plane crashed hard."

Mike Hiestand, a staff attorney with the Student Press Law Center, holds a copy of his book, Law of the Student Press, as he speaks during a Senate hearing, Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash. Washington state lawmakers are reintroducing a bill that would protect student journalists' free speech in school-sponsored media at public schools and colleges in response to a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that gave administrators control over what gets published in school media. Hiestand spoke in favor of the measure.(Photo: Ted S. Warren, AP)

He said students at Emerald Ridge High School in 2008 were "crucified by their peers and school" when the newspaper included the names and sexual histories of students in its edition about oral sex. The affected students sued the Puyallup School District, but a Pierce County jury ruled the First Amendment protected the student newspaper. The measure being considered by Washington lawmakers specifies that school officials would be protected from civil or criminal liability stemming from content in school-sponsored media.

Mike Hiestand, an attorney for the Student Press Law Center, said if schools are concerned about liability issues with this bill, they should get rid of their football teams and cheerleaders, which generally result in the most lawsuits filed against institutions.

Student-journalist free speech legislation has been expanding throughout the country. In 2007, following Washington state's initial bill proposal, Oregon unanimously passed a similar student expression law prohibiting administrative censorship of journalism. Since then, 10 other states passed such legislation, and bills have also been filed in Vermont, Missouri and Indiana.

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Bill would give students control of school-sponsored media - Kitsap Sun

President Trump used his first full day in office to wage war on the media, accusing news organizations of lying about the size of his inauguration crowd as Saturdays huge protests served notice that a vocal and resolute opposition would be a hallmark of his presidency.

With Americans taking to the streets in red and blue states alike to emphatically decry a president they consider reprehensible and, even, illegitimate, Trump visited the Central Intelligence Agency for a stream-of-consciousness airing of grievances including against journalists, whom he called the most dishonest human beings on Earth.

Shortly thereafter, press secretary Sean Spicer addressed the media for the first time from the White House, where he yelled at the assembled press corps and charged it with sowing division with deliberately false reporting of Trumps inauguration crowd.

Trump claimed that the crowd for his swearing-in stretched down the Mall to the Washington Monument. It did not. Trump accused television networks of showing an empty field and reporting that he drew just 250,000 people to witness Fridays ceremony.

It looked like a million, a million and a half people, Trump said. Its a lie. We caught [the media]. We caught them in a beauty.

(Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

During his 2009 inaugural address, President Obamas crowd extended that far, and a side-by-side comparison of aerial photos from both inaugurations clearly shows that Obamas crowd was much larger than Trumps.

[Trump, in CIA visit, attacks media for coverage of his inaugural crowds]

Spicer echoed his bosss assertion about the inauguration, insisting from behind the podium at the White House press briefing room that more than 700,000 people stretched down the Mall to the Washington Monument.

This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period both in person and around the globe, Spicer said, less than a minute after declaring that no one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the Mall, does not release crowd estimates.

One verifiable number that Spicer offered was that ridership on Washingtons subway system on Friday was higher than for Obamas inauguration four years ago. Spicer said that 420,000 people rode Metro on Friday, while only 317,000 did so for Obama in 2013. Both of these numbers are inaccurate. Nearly 571,000 people rode on Friday, and 782,000 rode on Inauguration Day four years ago, according to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Spicer warned journalists that they are in for more sparring with the new administration. Theres been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable, and Im here to tell you that it goes two ways, he said. Were going to hold the press accountable as well.

In a highly unusual move, Spicer left the briefing room without answering questions from reporters, including one shouted at him about Saturdays Womens March on Washington.

Trump and Spicer also lambasted a member of the White House press pool who reported Friday that Trump had removed a bust of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.

The bust remains in the Oval Office, but pool reporter Zeke Miller of Time magazine did not see it during a brief visit to witness Trump signing an executive order on health care. Miller corrected his pool report and tweet Friday evening and publicly apologized for the mistake. In response, Spicer tweeted, Apology accepted.

Nonetheless, Trump called the episode an example of how dishonest the media is.

Trump visited the CIAs headquarters in Langley, Va., to express his gratitude for the intelligence community, which he had repeatedly railed against during the transition period and recently likened to Nazis.

What the newly inaugurated president delivered before some 400 career intelligence officers in one of the governments most hallowed settings the wall of carved stars memorializing officers who died in the line of duty was a disjointed, campaign-style monologue. He complained about the Senate delaying confirmation of his nominees; critics questioning whether he is smart and vigorous; and journalists reporting on the size of his inauguration crowd.

I have a running war with the media, Trump declared. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth, right?

Many in the crowd which was composed of agency employees who had signed up to see him speak as well as some of Trumps White House aides applauded. At one point, Trump claimed that most of the people in the room had voted for him.

John Brennan, who resigned Friday as CIA director at the conclusion of Obamas presidency, said through a spokesman that he was angry about Trumps speech.

Former CIA Director Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trumps despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIAs Memorial Wall of Agency heroes, Nick Shapiro, a former deputy chief of staff to Brennan, said in a statement. Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself.

The presidents performance was jarring to some current intelligence officials as well.

That was one of the more disconcerting speeches Ive seen, said one senior U.S. intelligence official who was not present for the speech but watched it on video. He could have kept it very simple and said, Im here to build some bridges. But he spent 10seconds on that, and the rest was on the crowd size.

The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said Trumps use of the CIA memorial wall as a backdrop was offensive.

In his visit the first of what aides said would be many to federal departments and agencies Trump tried to express solidarity with the CIA and blamed the media for creating distrust.

They sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community, he said. I just want to let you know, the reason youre the number one stop is it is exactly the opposite.

He added, I know maybe sometimes you havent gotten the backing that youve wanted, and youre going to get so much backing. Maybe youre going to say, Please, dont give us so much backing. Mr. President, please, we dont need so much backing.

In fact, Trump repeatedly vilified the intelligence community throughout much of his transition in an attempt to push back against what he saw as politically charged conclusions by the CIA and other agencies about Russias hacking of Democratic Party emails to interfere with the 2016 election.

At a Jan.11 news conference, Trump accused U.S. intelligence officials of being behind a Nazi-like smear campaign against him. He has put quotation marks around the word intelligence in referring to such officials. And last weekend, he attacked Brennan in a pair of tweets, suggesting he was the leaker of Fake News.

[The director of the CIA just went off on Donald Trump. It was a long time coming.]

In his remarks at Langley, Trump vowed to lead the fight against the Islamic State: We have not used the real abilities that we have. He added, Radical Islamic terrorism and I said it yesterday has to be eradicated, just off the face of the Earth. This is evil.

Trump also delved into the Iraq War, repeating his oft-stated belief that the United States bungled its exit from the country by not taking Iraqs oil, which he said was how the Islamic State made its money.

The old expression, to the victor belong the spoils, he said, adding: We shouldve kept the oil. But, okay, maybe well have another chance.

At the White House, where the chants of a huge crowd on the Mall for the Womens March on Washington could be heard for much of the day, Trumps advisers grappled with this difficult reality: There will be no honeymoon for the 45th president.

The 44th president, Barack Obama, had urged Americans to give his successor a chance. But the activists who stirred the masses on Saturday vowed to obstruct Trumps agenda on such issues as health care, climate change, criminal justice, gay rights and access to abortion and birth control.

As the images from coast to coast were being broadcast on cable news, Trump spent the morning at an interfaith prayer service choreographed to promote national unity. The service at Washington National Cathedral featured a diverse array of religious readings and patriotic hymns, including a Muslim call to prayer from Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society Center in Sterling, Va.

[Womens marches: Millions of protesters vow to resist President Trump]

But the prayer service appeared to do little to quiet the resistance.

This is likely to be a feature of the entire presidency, said Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican strategist who criticized Trumps candidacy. If you look back to the rise of the tea party over 2009 and 2010 the revolt that took place at the town hall meetings, the protests thats starting with this president at an earlier hour and in numbers that are by orders of magnitude greater.

David Axelrod, one of Obamas closest advisers and an architect of his campaign strategies, said it is incumbent upon Trumps opponents to do more than march.

This is an impressive display today. But if it isnt channeled into organizing in a focused way, then it is cathartic but not in the long run meaningful, he said. Thats the challenge for the progressive community.

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Trump wages war against the media as demonstrators protest his presidency - Washington Post

By Mark Binker

Raleigh, N.C. When former Gov. Pat McCrory turned over the keys to North Carolina's Executive Mansion to Gov. Roy Cooper on Jan. 1, his staff didn't include the keys to the social media accounts used by the Governor's Office.

The Republican's picture still adorns what were his office's official Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and the last post on those platforms dates to a Dec. 31 goodbye message from McCrory.

"My understanding is there were conversations with the transition team about turning them over," said Ford Porter, a spokesman for the Cooper administration. "Ultimately, they did not."

Cooper took over from McCrory on New Year's Day after an acrimonious and contested campaign. Instead of assuming control of social media assets created by state employees using state-owned equipment, the Cooper administration created new accounts from scratch.

"In some instances, it was simply easier to create a new account," Porter said.

He declined to elaborate on why the transition didn't happen, but he did say that it was his understanding those government-maintained accounts were government property.

Social media management is a small matter in terms of getting a handle on running a state that spends around $50 billion in state and federal tax dollars every year. But Twitter and other social media platforms have become a primary mode for some politicians to communicate with constituents. President Donald Trump has been an avid Twitter user, and the spokeswoman for state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger twice this week pointed to statements made on the lawmaker's Facebook page as a way of delivering official reaction to current events.

McCrory used his accounts to distribute weather warnings and information about disaster recovery efforts as well as pictures from official photo ops and holiday greetings.

Porter said he wasn't worried that North Carolinians might confuse the old official social media platforms for the new ones or that some former McCrory administration staffer could use the accounts to cause mischief.

However, the Cooper administration has asked the companies that run the platforms to grant the state access to make sure the social media pages will be archived, per state law.

The social media platforms curated by the old administration weren't terribly robust in terms of how many followers they had. That's in part because, in 2015, McCrory's team transferred control of pages created by his office and most of McCrory's social media followers along with them to the Republican's campaign.

So, McCrory's political Facebook page has more than 202,000 "likes," while the official page only has about 21,000 "likes."

Cooper has almost bolstered his official Facebook following to catch up to his predecessor's official account. The situation on Twitter is similar, where McCrory's political account has many more followers than the account established for the Governor's Office.

Still, the disconnect in the handover is striking given the amount of planning that went into handing over presidential social media assets by the Obama administration.

"It kind of sounds like neither side really thought about it," said Joseph Cabosky, a UNC School of Media and Journalism professor whose work focuses on politics and entertainment. While the state didn't loose a lot of ground, he said, it still costs time and money to rebuild those channels.

"They dropped a lot of equity value in a series of communications tools," he said.

The North Carolina State Archives has a program to archive important social media accounts, according to Sarah Koonts, director of the Division of Archives and Records.

"We work with agencies to identify those accounts that rise to the level of permanent retention. Our social medial archiving program is one of the longest running and most comprehensive ones of any state archives in the country," Koonts said.

However, the agency doesn't have policies that govern the transition of social media assets between elected officials.

"Any policies regarding internal management of agency passwords, etc., would be the responsibility of the agency," she said.

McCrory's former lead spokesman didn't reply to a message sent through his Facebook account seeking comment.

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The march towards President-elect Donald J. Trumps inauguration has been a slow one,each day bringing a new outburst, a new incompetent cabinet pick, or a new rambling interview.

Today, the terrible, unsurprising news is that Trump intends to eliminate funding for both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

For those unfamiliar with the NEH and NEA, both organizations are independent federal agencies that award money to artists, authors, cultural institutions, museums, scholars, radio stations, and just about any other person or organization that might contribute to the cultural wealth of the country.

Thats all well and good, you might say, but our country is in debt! The budget! Deficit! Certainly, in times of economic austerity, the arts, no matter how precious, must be the first to go you cant eat a Mapplethorpe, after all. So just how much of the federal budget did these gluttonous behemoths of government waste take up last year? A combined .006%. Yes, you read that right: .006%.

To accompany the number, The Washington Post published a helpful pie chart, or, as they write, sort of a pie chart. If you were at Thanksgiving and demanded a slice of pecan pie proportionate to 2016 NEA spending relative to the federal budget, youd end up with a piece of pie that would need to be sliced off with a finely-tuned laser.

So why, of all the federal programs, would the NEA and NEH find themselves on the chopping block? Theres the long history of controversial grants; in 1989,the Senate attempted to destroy the NEA in response to their funding of Andres Serranos Piss Christ, a (brilliant) work of art in which Serrano created a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a jar of his own urine. Theres also the hardline conservative sentiment that all unnecessary government spending ought to be cut; that some of this spending happens to fund the arts is, in their thinking, immaterial. But Trump is a different kind of President-elect, and in his shadow this proposed extermination of two of our largest arts and culture funding programs seems different, that is, worse.

To be sure, both the conservative fiscal ideology and moralizing anti-art justifications are at play. One of Trumps most successful arguments during the campaign was that he was going to come to Washington not as a politician, but as a businessman. The only way we could end reduce the federal deficit and actually get things done, he argued, was to abandon the political games and bring a hard-nosed business ethos to issues both domestic and international.

Businessmen, as Trump would certainly confirm, are by-and-large beholden not to ideological concerns, but to profit. Insofar as the acquisition of an expensive work of art to adorn the lobby of Trump Tower might imbue the building with a sense of sophistication, thus making it more attractive to potential clients, then the work of art is a good investment. But as soon as tastes change, or the art no longer seems to fulfill its function, then it becomes disposable, a waste of space. The NEA and NEH take up an infinitesimal portion of the annual budget, but, from a business perspective, they have no apparent function. The value that they generate is abstract, and thus cannot be quantified. The natural consequence of government-as-business is the dissolution of those programs that cannot justify themselves in terms of the bottom line.

That the two agencies should be so often singled out by conservatives, despite their budgetary insignificance, however, speaks to their status as a perceived enemy of the right, and specifically to Trump. Artists have been outspoken critics of Trump since the beginning of his campaign, and their work in combatting his presidency is only just beginning (already weve seen the #J20 Strike, the RESIST! comics, the Writers Resist Rally, and the Ghostlight Project).

As Omarosa Manigualt, former contestant on The Apprentice and current assistant to the President and director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison stated just after the election, Mr. Trump has a long memory, and the campaign was keeping a list of people who did not support the then-candidates run. The suggestion was that the list was more than a simple clerical matter - it was a threat of retribution. And it appears as if they have begun to follow through.

Theres an even more sinister angle to all of this, however. In his essay Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare, the always incisive, always prescient Umberto Eco writes The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasnt called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

Our news media depends upon the government for information and access, and in that way it can be argued that every president enjoys a de-facto control over the message. Insofar as media outlets retain relative autonomy in terms of their staff and editorial decisions, however, they cannot be brought under the direct control of the White House. Trump cannot (yet) start replacing the heads of say, The New York Times or CNN, nor can he at this point control the way his message is received. (One exception: the rise of the professional Putin troll shows us that this is not so far fetched an idea.)

So what is the next best option for someone who seeks to control communication? Destroy the message altogether. The arts are not the media - they have always spoken to power in a way that mass media cannot. If you cannot control the arts, cancel them. If works like Piss Christ seem gratuitous in their provocations, it is only because in their gratuity they bludgeon us into reflection and, ideally, into action.

The NEH and NEA are two of our most important cultural funding institutions, without which projects and works like Live From the Lincoln Center, the Sundance Film Festival, The Mingus Project, The Perseus Digital Library, the Humanities Open Book Program, the poetry of W.S. Merwin, and the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer the negative impact this will have on the Jewish world seems manifestly obvious might not have been possible. If he follows through on cancelling the funding of the two agencies, and by proxy, kneepcapping the art and artistic programs that they help create, Trump will have removed a crucial bulwark of speech against his administration, and will have positioned himself one step closer to the media control that Umberto Eco (rightly, I think) deems the necessary precursor to takeover.

The American cultural institutions are Trumps enemies in both explicit and implicit ways. The explicit is obvious, the implicit less so. Trump was so successful as a presidential candidate because of his penchant for media spectacle, for his masterfully tasteless aesthetics, and for his crass marathon speech performances. In other words, Trump employed the tactics of art to win the election. Im only partially kidding when I say that Trump may be our first Dada President. (Tristan Tzara, one of the movements founding fathers, seems to call out from behind the Make America Great Again hat: We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition.)

The proposed dissolution of the NEA and NEH is a signal from Trump:This town is not big enough for the both of us.

Insofar as Trump desires to control the message of the media not just the news, but the arts as well he must become the medias message, and he achieves this through spectacle. (At this effort, he has already enjoyed unprecedented unpresidented? success.) Spectacle is dependent upon novelty, upon motion and eager eyes. Spectacle cannot tolerate distraction.Anything that might occupy a similar prominence must be removed if it cannot be made part of the show.

Perhaps we should look at Trumps budget proposal not as the work of a businessman, but rather as the work of a malcontented artist -one media presence simply removing its competition.

The NEA and NEH, as bastions of funding for the so-called high arts, are easy targets in this war of aesthetic removal. A study by the NEA published in 2015 showed a negative trend in attendance to core arts events opera, jazz, classical music, ballet, musical theater, plays, art museum and gallery visits between 2002 and 2012. In the complementary Annual Arts Basic Survey (2013-2015), we can see that while attendance to core arts events has stagnated since 2012, the AABS shows a drop in the share of adults reading literature from 47% to 43.1%. Due to their declining or stagnating popularity, the removal of arts institutions is less likely to generate public outcry than the removal of their mass media counterparts. This does not mean that seemingly innocuous pop-culture is safe. If weve learned anything this past year, its that theres plenty wisdom to that old childrens story: if you give a mouse a cookie or a reality TV star a primary well, hell inevitably want a glass of milk.

To be clear, there is a legitimate criticism to be made about the coupling of state and art. Arts power lies in its autonomy, and its arguable that the necessity of state funds compromises this autonomy and mitigates arts radical potential. (Another ever present worry: what were to happen if, instead of destroying the two agencies, Trump or any President turned them into programs of state propaganda?) But, thus far, the NEH and NEA have been forces for public and artistic good. And in a time that is increasingly anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, anti-art, and anti-science, we need the NEH and NEA now more than ever.

Jake Romm is the Forwards culture intern. Contact him at romm@forward.com or on Twitter, @JakeRomm

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If Trump Eliminates The National Endowment For the Arts, Artists Will Suffer And So Will the Public - Forward