On his ninth day, Donald Trump’s new administration finally summoned the White House press corps to the Brady Briefing Room. It was vintage Trump.
For close to an hour on Tuesday, the youngest White House press secretary in history, Karoline Leavitt, decried legacy media, disparaged the Biden administration and personally insulted the former president. At one point she said that Joe Biden probably hadn’t taken presidential action on the price of eggs because he was “upstairs in the residence sleeping.”
That’s right. She bore false witness against her neighbor while wearing a cross around her neck declaring her Christian beliefs. Leavitt also said she was committed to telling the truth while speaking on behalf of President Donald Trump. So if he lies, as he does on a daily basis, will she repeat it? She didn’t say and no one asked. I guess she thinks she can have it both ways.
Other things that went unasked and unanswered? No one asked how the president, through an executive order, could freeze government spending. The Constitution specifically states that Congress has the job of imposing taxes and spending money, giving it what is colloquially known as “the power of the purse.” On Wednesday, the White House rescinded that budget memo, which had sparked confusion and multiple legal challenges. To create still more confusion, Leavitt said later on Wednesday afternoon that while the memo had been rescinded, the actions of the president remained in full force. Hello?
No one asked Leavitt to explain why she believes birthright citizenship is unconstitutional when the 14th Amendment states things clearly: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States of the state wherein they reside.”
Many members of the press seemed ecstatic to be in the briefing room. They took selfies. They laughed. The room was packed. At least half of them beamed and smiled and offered Leavitt fulsome thanks, especially the “content providers” to whom she offered seats along the wall that are usually reserved for White House staff. One of those folks lauded her efforts, saying she was doing a great job. Only April Ryan gave her a deadpan, sober salutation: “Welcome to the briefing room.”
There was a time when White House briefings didn’t include fawning reporters eager to be seen and heard as they bowed and scraped in front of the press secretary. I have to admit, that was long ago.
Many members of the "press" seemed ecstatic to be in the briefing room. They took selfies. They laughed. The room was packed, and at least half of them were beaming and smiling and offering Karoline Leavitt fulsome thanks.
Sam Donaldson, Helen Thomas and scores of others whom I looked up to and learned from as a young reporter were among the best. They asked tough questions. They spoke truth to power. They broke stories. They informed the world. A ringside seat at the White House was something earned through decades of slogging through the political and journalistic mud. Now, Leavitt wants to give preferential seating to media influencers who have no experience but are producing “news-related” content.
Some will blame the “legacy media” for this turn of events, and they wouldn’t be wrong. The failures of corporate media are the direct cause of its spiral into irrelevance. But of course, every president since Ronald Reagan has also been complicit in that demise, which has led us to “independent content creators” who are nothing more than propagandists and shills. Because of them and their questions, the 27-year-old press secretary can show her subservience to the Don with a wry smile and a cheerful expression.
We need your help to stay independent
Reporters today seem too busy bending the knee to the power of a man convicted of multiple felonies. Ask Jim Acosta. He was squeezed out at CNN because he spoke up against Trump and had his press pass revoked. I should know; the same thing happened to me. Trump hates him. Acosta is defiant. “It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant. Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope,” he said, signing off for the last time at CNN.
Trump responded by calling Jim “a major loser” and “one of the worst and most dishonest reporters in journalistic history; a major sleazebag.” I have to wonder whether Trump was shouting into his makeup mirror when he wrote that one.
At any rate, most of us in the media have traded our responsibility to the American people for access to the known con man now in the White House, who claims he is deporting violent criminals, while at the same time releasing 1,500 of them from prison — the ones, of course, who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He calls those criminals “patriots.”
Leavitt blasted the legacy media in her first press conference, but it was completely disingenuous. She claimed Trump has already held press conferences, which is a lie. He’s had extended “pool sprays,” where the protective “pool” of reporters has asked some easy questions, but he has not appeared before the full White House press corps. The “pool,” by the way, consists mostly of nameless and faceless refugees from the Actors Studio who work for legacy media. And those reporters he has faced are mostly the ones who parrot White House press releases.
It gets worse. According to the White House Correspondents Association, the first week of the second Trump administration has been “great.” In an email to WHCA members, president Eugene Daniels wrote, “The great news is our pools have had facetime with President Trump multiple times over the last week, and every signal from the administration is that will continue. In each of those gaggles, our pools have been able to ask tough, and informed questions cordially, while getting news over and over again.”
Well, the American people are getting something “over and over again” but I wouldn’t call it news. The word I’d prefer can’t be fully spelled out on this website.
Whatever you want to call it, it almost always concerns the day’s headlines, or some personality clash with Trump. When he was asked about his recent trip to California to view the wildfire devastation in Los Angeles, this exchange occurred:
Q: Are you disappointed that Sen. [Adam] Schiff hasn’t joined you on this trip? It’s reported that you invited Sen. Schiff to join you on this trip, and he was too busy. Are you disappointed by that?
Trump: I don't know. I was told that Schiff was going to travel with us to California. I wasn't thrilled, to be honest with you. (Laughter.) And I saw him last night on television. It looks like he got hit with a baseball bat or something. What happened to him? Something happened to him.
Very presidential.
Trump has actually shown up just once before a group of White House reporters so far, other than the local or travel pool. That was for two minutes, when he held a “chopper talk” session while walking from the White House to Marine One last week.
If you are not a member of the WHCA, then you didn’t know about it until after the fact. Why? Because until Tuesday, the Trump administration didn't publish a daily schedule. The good folks at the WHCA did. Daniels told us: “The good news is that the administration is working to get up to speed quickly for both week ahead guidance and daily guidance. It may not be immediate, but they are working on it. I have been sending out information” — but not to the entire press corps, just to his group’s members.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
That’s a blatant conflict of interest. It is not the WHCA’s job to assist the president’s publicity team. You cannot speak truth to power if you are doing the power’s bidding.
I wrote to the WHCA asking them to include other journalists in the publication of the daily presidential guidance, since the group was being pressed into service as Trump’s lackeys. I got no response.
When I emailed Leavitt to ask how the administration could justify saying that birthright citizenship was unconstitutional when it’s made explicit mentioned in the 14th amendment, she didn’t answer me either. Makes you wonder just how closely the WHCA and the White House are working together.
The fact is, these days reporters don’t exactly wear ourselves out trying to dig up the news, as romance once had it. We have, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, slipped supinely into the estate and dignity of a golf player. American journalism suffers from too many golf players, who love walking around the course with the Golfer in Chief.
Some look at Donald Trump and see the "father figure" we need in the White House, ready to smack down "spoiled teens" who are used to getting their way. But Donald Trump is not our father or our king. He's our elected employee.
Real reporters have largely been replaced by those who want to be “cordial” and bow to power. Years ago I challenged George H.W. Bush in a press briefing and was summarily fired for “being rude” to the president. Arnaud de Borchgrave, the former editor of the Washington Times and the first host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” had me on the first broadcast to berate me. “Nobody’s challenging your right to challenge the president,” he said. “What I’m challenging is your right to be rude.”
ABC’s Sam Donaldson, the king of “rude” during his time at the White House, said, “I’m not advocating rudeness . . . but I’m far more concerned about the reporters who are either too afraid or too disinclined to ask a question.”
Dan Rather was even blunter. In an interview with the Boston Herald in 1991, he said, “There’s no joy in saying this, but beginning in the 1980s, the American press by and large somehow began to operate on the theory that the first order of business was to be popular with the person or organization or institution that you cover.”
This is not a new phenomenon. Mencken wrote this in 1926: “They come in as newspapermen . . . trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tinhorn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write truth if they tried.”
Today, we are lazy, dishonest, stupid and cowardly.
Traditionally, we approached our jobs in the press as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. If the comfortable found us rude, then so be it. Those days are gone.
Some look at Donald Trump and see the “father figure” we need in the White House, ready to smack down “spoiled teens” who are used to getting their way. I’ve seen this meme posted on X and Facebook, by someone I’ve known for years. I shrug that off: I look at Donald Trump as an elected employee. My taxes pay his salary, as well as the salary of everyone who works for him in the executive branch. I don’t need a father there. I had my own. Since we are supposedly a government of, by and for the people, Trump works for us. He’s not a father, a king, a despot or a dictator. He’s an employee.
As Mencken put it, “If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this; that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense.”
Gone are the days of reporters who risked it all to hold those in power accountable. Ben Bagdikian, former editor of the Washington Post, reminded us that our responsibility is to the people. Not to the people who pay us, to our editors, our sources, our friends “or to the advancement of your career. It is to the public.”
That remains true even when the public doesn’t like what we say.
So I take no pleasure in saying that Donald Trump doesn’t meet the press. Instead, Donald Trump eats the press – and I don’t know whether we’ll ever wake up to that fact and do something about it. But I still naively cling to hope.
Shares