The Witch in the White House

Added to post on Jan. 31: Enjoyed this interview with the new press secretary. It's with an old friend, so it's a very favorable environment, but that intelligent, competent Willow vibe is not reduced by this:

It’s been 10 days since Joe Biden was inaugurated president of the United States.

We need a Washington press corps that will hold him accountable. And we need a president whose administration speaks straight and clearly, answering reasonable questions. Being president means you’re a lightning rod for criticism—and as has been said, if you can’t stand that heat, get out of the kitchen.

Still, one of the many odd aspects of the recent odd administration of Donald Trump was the way in which press briefings at the White House began, and then how they ground to a halt. Apparently, neither Trump nor his minions saw answering questions as a part of what government should do. Overall, the White House held few press briefings, with one Trump press secretary giving exactly zero during her tenure.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki during her first press briefing on Jan. 20, 2021. She has giving a briefing every business day since--a sharp contrast to the previous administration. All images on this post from Wikimedia Commons, both of these are screen shots from White House video.

I just watched the official White House You Tube video of Jen Psaki’s first press briefing, held the evening of Jan. 20. And then I watched samples of the two initial Trump press briefings—the odd crowd size rant at an unscheduled Saturday session on Jan. 21, 2017, and the first official press briefing on Jan. 23. They were both by then White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

Sean Spicer at a press berating session.

The contrast between the Sean Crazy Show and the Psaki Fact Briefing was clear. Sean didn’t get along well with reporters—but then again, Sean was telling outright and obvious lies. Remember the bizarre, fact-denying narrative of crowd size during those odd first days of the Trump presidency? It was a foreshadowing of many strange days to come, of President Trump urging Americans to ingest bleach or altering a weather map with a Sharpie.

Sean Spicer, what a guy! And he was followed by three female press secretaries, none known for their factual truth telling.

Future governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

There was Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who famously claimed that she had heard from “countless” members of the FBI about how grateful they were when President Trump fired FBI director James Comey. (Maybe zero counts as countless?) And Sarah is now on her way to becoming governor of Arkansas, heaven help us.

Stephanie Grisham

Next in line was Stephanie Grisham, who served for about a year and gave exactly zero press briefings. I think we should demand a refund of her government salary—White House press secretaries are named by the president, but as government employees, they work for us, and a press secretary who spends about a year never speaking publicly with the press in the briefing room is not fulfilling her job.

Kayleigh McEnany--I shall smile and I shall lie and then I shall fade away.

Then there was Kayleigh McEnany. What to say about her? In the middle of a pandemic, she defended the U.S. leaving the WHO because of it’s “clear bias towards China.” McEnany is no ninny—she’s an educated woman, but she seemed to think sniping at the press was her role.

Now, we have Jen Psaki, a veteran of the Obama administration, speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room. She gives a briefing every business day, which seems like a good thing for press secretary to do. She speaks calmly and factually—in listening to her first briefing, held on Jan. 20, I didn’t detect any point where she clearly lied or deliberately mislead the press.

And she didn’t get lost in irrelevancies. There were no wild claims about crowd size, nor berating the press for imagined slights.

What a breath of fresh air. I don’t want the press to go all euphoric—their job is to hold the powers-that-be accountable, and it’s inevitable nice old Joe will have to make hard and controversial decisions that Psaki will have to defend. Reporters need to ask her hard questions, but based on her first 10 days on the job, I think she’ll handle them calmly and competently without resorting to carpet bombing attacks on the media.

She’s off to a good start. Forgive me for this, but to me, she looks and sounds like Willow from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" who grew up and moved to Washington after attending UCS (University of California—Sunnydale). She has more confidence now, but still has the same kind of nerdy, intelligent demeanor.

And after the craziness of the past four years, it’s kind of a comfort to have a calm, smart, powerful and competent witch as White House press secretary.

Alyson Lee Hannigan (left) who played Willow on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," an mage from her Buffy days, and Jen Psaki (right) from when she was a wee lass working in the Obama Administration. Clearly the same person. Witches can be tricky.

 

The Saga of Sarah Comes to a Close

From Wikipedia, official government portrait used for press secretary twitter account.

I don’t appreciate some liberals who have mocked Sarah Huckabee Sanders—sure, she graduated form a Baptist university in Arkansas, but she was never empty. I teach at a private, religious university, too--and it's a place where future American leaders can be educated. Presidents don't all have to come from Harvard. And comments about her appearance were just as misogynist as comments conservatives made about Hillary Clinton’s wardrobe choices and face.

As this New Yorker story covers, Sanders is a pretty savvy political creature. She is a smart lady.

It’s not a joke that she might get to be governor of Arkansas. She might even someday be our first female president—after all, as Donald Trump showed, truth telling is not a requirement for the highest office in the land these days.

But Sanders was a terrible press secretary. Despite private rapport with reporters, she very publicly was perfectly willing to echo to worst lies of the worst president in U.S. history, and showed his public contempt for the press. A press secretary, even one for a lying president, has no business lying to reporters, as Sanders did repeatedly.

Still, there is another side of the story. The Washington press core is elitist and liberal. That doesn’t mean they don’t have an important role that most of them take seriously and professionally try to fulfill, but I don’t see any point in denying that a particular side of the political spectrum is over-represented in the Washington press.

And yet—it’s not the White House’s place to choose who covers the White House. The press, flawed and biased as it is, is there to get answers for the American people. Journalists have an important function in our democracy, one that Huckabee Sanders, representing her authoritarian boss, publicly attacked.

The president will no doubt name a new press secretary. Who it is may make some difference, but probably not much. This deeply flawed, anti-American president has declared the media the “enemy” of the American people, and his press secretaries have merely been the front line troops in his ongoing war with truth and facts and the American way.

And the sad truth is that much of the Republican base agrees with Trump, partly out of frustration at the sense of being looked down on by media elites. And, like Trump, Sanders is not what’s wrong with the modern Republican party—her flawed press secretary tenure represented a very real, and very dangerous anti-media bias that today is common up and down the Republican party. In Iowa, too many Republican candidates have refused, for instance, to participate in media voter guide questionnaires or meetings with newspaper editorial boards. That’s a dangerous and too common precedent.

The mainstream media is an endangered species these days. The staffs of newsrooms have been severely cut back since the 2008 recession. Republicans seem to relish the extinction of the species. That’s a mistake. Liberal bias or not, journalism is the lifeblood of a democracy. The Republican party seems full of vampires who are willing to drain that blood.

And Sarah is an intelligent, determined and dangerous blood sucker who sadly is very much at home in that party.

The Newest Attack on the Fourth Estate

Newsprint—it’s the news media’s Achilles heel.

President Trump has called mainstream news media “enemies of the American people,” a rather startling escalation from “fake news” by an irresponsible national leader. It’s language that echoes sentiments of dictators and totalitarians, rather than a responsible U.S. President.

But I don’t think many intelligent adults would consider Trump to be a “responsible U.S. President.”

Earlier this month, in the wake of another Trump attack on the media, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders to say the press isn’t the enemy. “It’s ironic Jim, that you attack the President,” she shot back. And she listed a litany complains, noting she is the “first press secretary to require Secret Service protection.”

Well, that’s terrible. But Sanders doesn’t own any of her own part in creating the divisive discourse that tears at the fabric of our democracy and makes it seem impossible these days to have a civil discussion of real issues. And she never acknowledges the bedrock principle that Acosta asked her about: The press is listed as being free in our First Amendment because a free press is a necessary ingredient for a self-governing body politic to function well.

And we, that body politic, are growing less functional, partly due to the current horrible administration that keeps scooping sand into the grease of the gears of our government.

Still, it’s not news that Donald J. Trump, an immature narcissist, only likes sycophantic media attention. And Sanders is a spokesperson for Trump. Her job is to preach his message, no matter how bad or wrongheaded that message is.

And Trump’s message, on this point, is authoritarian. It steps over the line of endangering an already endangered species—the few journalists that remain active in this country, nowadays. Those reporters work with targets on their backs placed there by an unashamedly shameful President Trump.

Yeah, as a journalism professor, former reporter and media writer, I’m bitter about the horribleness of Donald J. Trump and his minions and his alternative media universe. But I think I have rational grounds for that bitterness.

Remember how President Trump as a candidate mocked a New York Times reporter’s physical disability? I’m sorry, Sarah Sanders, that you feel you’ve been personally attacked. But look at the conduct of your boss and tell me he’s not setting a low tone for public discourse.

Image of early press in Oregon from Wikimedia Commons.

And Trump’s war on the press includes an important recent jab. The free press in this country grew historically with loads of indirect government support. Newspapers used to be sidelines of print shops that sprang up in county seats as the country grew, partly to handle government printing. The U.S. Postal Service, the internet of the early Republic, offered very favorable rates that allowed newspapers to circulate and exchange information easily.

Of course, the press-government relationship can be too cozy, and a free press needs to guard its own independence. I recall once on the final day of the legislative session in Missouri, excitedly entering the tiny office of the newspaper Capitol bureau in Jefferson City and telling my editor that “they are offering free hot dogs in the halls.”

My editor fixed me with a dour stare. “I. Do. Not. Eat. With. Those. People,” he informed me.

Well, from his physical appearance, I’m not sure he ate anywhere—he was a wiry old codger who seemed to subsist on caffeine and nicotine (It was the ‘80s, a world that has long passed away). (Note that I'm attacking the physical appearance of a person who I respect and who I agree with—for effect, by the way. Sarah, if you are reading, that's an attack on physical appearance--you burning lies for a perfect smokey eye isn't the same.) But I mostly remember his point. He didn’t say I couldn’t have a hot dog if I wanted (and truth be told I’ve never let my sense of professional ethics stand in the way of free food), but I admired his spirit.

And his idea. Be independent of your sources. Don’t get too chummy. You are you and they are they and you both need to understand your often-adversarial roles. But I didn’t hate the Missouri politicians that I wrote about, and I don’t think they hated me.

I don’t trust politicians, yet I still have respect for them. Their motives aren’t pure and they bear watching (which is what a press is for), but they are also, most of them, motivated by a sense of mission and public service.

Government is messy, sometimes corrupt and often inefficient, but since we try to be governed by “we the people,” we can’t point our finger at “them” without some fingers pointing back at us. Or as Pogo put it: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Anyway, one of President Trumps recent initiatives is to instigate trade wars as a bargaining ploy for better trade deals. I am not an economist, and despite my trepidation at what seems to be a wrong-headed policy, I’ll conceded it’s possible he’s playing some international game of chess that may help equalized past inequities in trade. Frankly, I doubt it, but it’s something that I can strain to imagine.

However, his targets are often odd. Canada? We have an intertwined economy with our friendly frozen neighbors to the north, and we can’t hurt them without hurting us, too. And one product in particular that’s caught up in the this tariff tiff is newsprint, the price of which is expected to rise 30 percent due to Trump’s import tariffs.

This comes at a time when newspapers are already in a steep decline as a part of the overall news media system. Trump didn’t cause that decline, but he’s kicking a part of the historic media system when it’s down.

Making the Trump paper tariffs go away won’t revive the newspaper business. It’s likely the New York Daily News would be letting go of half its news staff anyway. But Trump's trade policies are yet another blow to an ailing free press, another hit on his “enemies.”

And democracy in American is less healthy as a result.

Sarah Sanders, if it were up to me, you would not need the Secret Service to protect you. But don’t blame the “enemy press” for your personal safety issues—you are caught up in a firestorm that your own boss keeps pouring gasoline on. As I’ve said before, the current biggest enemy of the American people isn’t the press that brings them the bad news of the day.

It’s the incompetent president who keeps generating more bad news—and is now making that news more expensive to print.

Trump’s Dangerous Attack on “Fake” News

CNN home page Feb. 25--after CNN was excluded from White House briefing.

Shouts of adulation greeted President Trump’s strange CPAC speech Friday, a speech that chillingly included his continued assault on what he calls “fake” news.

And then, the same day, the White House excluded certain news outlets from a daily briefing. The excluded outlets included The New York Times, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC and POLITICO.

In his Friday speech, Trump in one breath mocked the media for worrying about the fate of the First Amendment—which he said nobody loves more than himself—and then says use of anonymous sources should “not be allowed.”

Trump can’t seem to understand himself. It’s true that many past presidents awarded favorable news coverage with media access, and excluded unfavorable outlets. It’s also true that the Obama administration had a bad reputation for secrecy and pursuing leaks. But Trump’s call for specific practices to be “not allowed” or calling some of the most mainstream news sources “enemies” goes beyond anything I’ve seen before.

It’s chilling. It’s un-American, to quote CNN's Jake Tapper  (although he was talking about the White House exclusion and not the CPAC speech--but I think the same thinking applies). It’s dangerous to democracy.

And it comes from a President who himself can’t tell fact from fiction. Fact check sites lit up like Christmas trees trying to chase after the strange falsehoods in the Friday speech of the President who decries “fake” news.

Among the fake lines in President Trump’s speech:

• He claimed the media dropped the word “fake” from reports about his tweet attack last week, in which he said “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBC, @ABC, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.” News reports in all of those outlets quoted the President’s bizarre rant in its entirety, so the supposed exclusion of “fake” was itself fake.

• He claimed he got “many” votes from Bernie Sanders supporters. Well, I supposed that depends on how you define “many,” there certainly were Sanders supporters who voted for Trump, but The New York Times reported that number appeared to range from 3 percent to 13 percent (the variance is because the only data on this point comes from polls, and those with third party candidates included had dramatically different results). It’s a stretch to call that “many.” And since Trump doesn’t believe polls and polls are the only data on this point—where can his information possibly come from?

• He claimed the polls all got the election wrong. In fact, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, as polls predicted. Three key states swung Trump’s way and gave him a narrow Electoral College victory, but that hardly de-legitimizes all polls. And Trump has continued to lie about the elections results, falsely blaming his vote loss on cheating, and staking claim to some grand Electoral College mandate that doesn’t exist outside of his imagination.

• He said the Affordable Care Act took healthcare away from people. Most estimates are that about 20 million Americans gained coverage due to the ACA. Some people did lose their previous plans, but the number of insured American grew dramatically—the uninsured rate dropped to a historic low under the law.

I checked PolitiFact.com, the Washington Post’s fact check site and the New York Times fact check story on Trump’s speech. All had similar long lists of Trump lies. The list of lies above comes mostly from the Times.

You could ignore the list because you think it comes from the “fake” news media. But that means that you’re buying into a delusional and false world view represented by the current liar-in-chief.

Look, I would not claim there is not bias in the media. Certainly, as a group, people who work at large metropolitan media outlets are more liberal than the country as a whole—but that has a lot to do with an education bias. More educated people, as a group, are more liberal than the population as a whole. And journalism as a profession, for various cultural reasons, has always attracted many people with a liberal bent.

But political bias isn’t not the same as “fake.” Unlike Trump, the New York Times takes great effort to verify the facts it reports.

I think it’s OK to worry about political bias in the media, but to me, the greater problem is fact bias among the public. Too many tune out because they're convinced the media lie, especially when that's the consistent message from the Trump camp.

But, Trump—most of us know you lie. Pretty much whenever your lips are moving. And you’ve embarked on a dangerous path—a road that doesn’t lead to democracy, but that is tinged with authoritarianism. The “fake” media are free under the First Amendment, because the founders believed an independent press was necessary for a democracy.

And you don’t seem to get it.

We salute with pride the same American flag. That flag stands for freedom. Your petulant lying attacks on media that you don’t like because they report unpleasant truths about your failing administration do not promote that freedom, but run counter to it.

Sure, your lies are protected the same First Amendment, but all of us have a right to call you on them, too. In my heart, I believe that the flag waves for honest journalists who won’t be intimidated by you.