Ah, Those Reporters
If it just me, or is the media getting dumber by the day? Certainly more biased, less informed, more hostile. Anytime White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt says, “As the president said over the weekend,” or “As I announced when we first told you of the plans,” it becomes clear that reporters no longer do their homework. Who needs facts when you have a narrative? Most of their questions are implicit criticisms, assuming the president is so ignorant he needs their policy suggestions.
Consider this exchange as Trump took questions while seated alongside Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the Oval Office.
“You are the most powerful man on earth. Why don’t you just enable Ukraine to finish this war tomorrow?” asked Latika Bourke of The Nightly Australia.
“Well, if you know anything about what you were talking about,” Trump fired back.
“I do, I do,” she quickly pushed back as Trump insisted “I don’t think you do really.”
Sometimes when they ask inane questions they provide unintentional fodder for Trump’s best lines. Recently a reporter asked Trump why he doesn’t just go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war against the cartels bringing drugs to the USA by land or sea. As if his administration had not considered that. As if he, the reporter, was some kind of policy genius whose advice would sway Trump.
“I don’t think we’re gonna necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”
First Lady Melania Trump was asked once by a reporter to name the president’s pet peeve. “Stupid people,” she said.
We are in a new era. After Dems tried to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024, to prosecute him with four “felonies,” to threaten to bankrupt him and to force him to spend the rest of his life in prison, and then to attempt to kill him, so far three times that we know of, Trump finds himself in a land of FAFO, able to say what he really believes, especially to stupid people, while surrounded by a Cabinet of like mind.
AG Pam Bondi and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. routinely parry with radical lefties on the Hill, countering their inane questions with counter punches. When Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — he once claimed he had served in Vietnam when he hadn’t — called Bondi corrupt, she said, “I can’t believe you would accuse me of me of impropriety when you lied about your military service. How dare you?”
And when Kennedy testified before a Senate committee, Dems were outraged that he had fired the CDC director and revamped the vaccine advisory board. He pointed out that America was the sickest nation in the world, and that Sen. Elizabeth Warren had taken $885,000 in campaign donations from Big Pharma.
Over at the War Department, Secretary Hegseth has so triggered reporters they have literally left the building. In mid-October, the Pentagon changed its credentialing requirements. Reporters who are American citizens can access the Pentagon 24 hours a day but must ensure their press credentials are visible and worn above the waist. They need an escort for interviews in the building. And they have to sign that they understand their passes can revoked or not renewed if they “solicit government employees to violate the law by providing confidential government information.”
It was as if Trump had framed the Dems into a corner, pinning the government shutdown on them. This time it was Hegseth who set the bait — without memes of course — and what a catch. En masse, all the credentialed journalists who had been covering the Pentagon — including Fox News and Newsmax — refused the sign the Pentagon’s new media guidelines and left in a huff of faux outrage.
The Pentagon Press Association called it “a dark day for press freedom.”Their chests puffed with pride, delighting in their “solidarity,” they turned in their press passes and walked out, forgetting that these were the same rules as on any military base in the country. As John Solomon reminded us, these same news organizations acceded to Obama-era censorship at Gitmo and agreed to far stricter requirements to cover Guantánamo Bay — promises by these news outlets not to publish sensitive information, not to interview certain subjects, to stay out of certain areas, and to allow military handlers to censor what photos and videos reporters used.
And just like that, the Pentagon’s storied press corps — The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, Fox News, NBC News, and CBS News —was banished. Soon enough, the War Department announced over 60 replacements, including OAN, the only one of the old crew to re-sign, as well as Real America’s Voice, the Gateway Pundit, the Post Millennial, and Human Events and a host of other conservative and independent voices.
Maybe the media are getting dumber. Or maybe they’re just digging their own graves.