The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association said President Donald Trump’s administration wanted him to publicly criticize an article Politico reporter Tara Palmeri wrote about media access.
Appearing on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday, the correspondents’ association president and Reuters reporter Jeff Mason confirmed that it was Palmeri’s reporting he’d been asked to condemn.
He refused to do so and didn’t reveal the name of the reporter until this weekend.
Palmeri, who was also on “Reliable Sources” Sunday, said she wasn’t surprised by the revelations, saying she had heard the White House wanted her removed from the association.
“Which they don’t have power to do. They’re an independent association. And they were upset because I wrote a story that was completely factual, that over the course of the trip, the president had not given a press conference. That is plain and simple,” she said. “And we also did not get access to senior administration officials regularly until my story came out. After that, we had so much more access to them.”
She criticized the President’s constant attack on the media and defended the work she and others have done to cover the new administration.
“I think at the end of the day, we’re supposed to be balanced. We shouldn’t be pro-Trump or anti-Trump,” she said. “We should just be all about the facts and the issues and I think there is a prerogative to say ‘Oh they’re being anti-Trump,’ but no we’re being critical, it’s our job to be critical regardless of who the president is.”
.@tarapalmeri: It's "our job, to be critical. Regardless of who the President is" https://t.co/NMcbKfM87e
— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) July 16, 2017
Trump continued his crusade against the media this weekend, tweeting Sunday that “Fake news is distorting democracy in our country.”
With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 16, 2017
Free Speech for me not for thee.
To coin a phrase, it’s the job of reporters to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Poor Donnie. He thought that once elected he would be loved. He thought the national press would be like the “reporters” for the tabloids of the 1980s.
Bullshit. Reporters are not supposed to be balanced. If they were supposed to be balanced then where are the comments from the flat earth society telling us that the Malaysian Airline plane that went missing had fallen off the edge of the earth?
They are supposed to be accurate and factual. They are supposed to provide their readers a better understanding of the world around them. They are supposed to guide their readers through all the bullshit and the vested interests, and this will necessarily require them to pick sides. The difference is the side they pick should be based on truth and reality as best as we can know it and not based on who is lining their pockets.
And with an administration as corrupt as the Trump administration, which constantly lies, and more importantly, tries to undermine the very basis of democracy on which journalism depends, an anti-Trump position is basically a prerequisite for anyone to call themselves a journalist, until the administration stops reflexively lying.
You can’t always get what you want, eh, Donnie?