White House Drops Plan To Suspend Acosta’s Press Pass A Second Time
What’s the catch?
Who will rid me of this meddlesome Constitution?!
Kavanaugh: Right here, boss.
Ok, you can have your press pass back, but only because WE decided that, pay no attention to that judge over there. Oh, and Acosta is now on double secret probation.
If these people were any more petty and small, we would need an electron microscope to see them.
Bully Trump backs down from another threat. In other news, water still wet, sky still blue.
Shorter Trump: I am a chicken.
Flaccid and weak, Donald.
What’s the catch? The new rules sound like kindergarten, with only one question and no follow up.
That is ridiculous, unworkable, and simply a inane trap to toss those they do not like.
It the WHores Press Corpse agrees to this, they are all worthless toadies, more concerned about the gala party at the end of the year, than doing their jobs.
Idiots led by an Idiot in Chief.
The White House chef has announced that crow will be on the menu for tonight’s Presidential dinner.
The new rules tell reporters to ask only one question and yield the microphone (unless specifically granted a follow-up). This is actually a good thing, or at least it could be if “one question” really means one question.
The standard in recent years has been for reporters to pack 2 or more questions into their opening salvo (not talking about follow-ups here, just things like “Is X true, and also, will you be doing Y?”) This allows the president or press secretary to easily avoid one or both questions, by choosing which one to answer or just veering off the resulting mish-mash of overly long verbiage.
Single, clear questions are harder to avoid and evasion is more obvious. On the downside, follow-ups will have to come from other reporters who will have to think on their feet.
OT, but the best suggestion I have seen regarding these so-called press briefings is that the camera should remain on the president or press secretary and the questioner should not be shown. That would shorten things up a bit, I think.
The catch is the list of “appropriate” behavior, which includes no follow-ups without permission; “yielding the floor to the next person.” Failure to do so will result in suspension or revocation of the hard pass.
Seems to me that they should just make the journalists stand in the corner with a dunce cap on.
Clearly the press needs to respond to this insult. My idea is to send only one journalist to any official press “show.” That journalist should have a list of proposed questions from a pool. An aide should sit with a laptop to do fact-check and provide corrections (something tells me this is not allowed). But only one press representative should solve the follow-up question problem and also send a message. These fu**ers need to be starved of attention.
Really wise move by CNN. The Trump judge hearing the case just was looking for a way to rule for Trump, given his questions at Oral Argument, but could not invent something that would not make him look like he was fluffing for his master.
The WH has back down, CNN takes the victory, and dismisses the suit. And if the WH does something funky, they file a new suit, and hopefully draw a better (fairer) judge.
Perhaps even the Trump administration realized that applying rules retroactively would be problematic, but we can be sure that they will apply them arbitrarily in the near future, and achieve the same results with a slightly better pretense of plausibility. (I sometimes think that all journalists should just boycott the press briefings since no real information is ever offered and no answers given. What would we really be missing?)
babies
i believe it’s salted pork from an expired barrell left over from the civil war
Trump: Bwawk! Bwawk! Bwawk!
Chickenshit
"Each journalist shall ask “a single question” at a time, unless allowed follow-ups “at the discretion of the President or other White House officials.”
I think “reached out to” is becoming a tedious journalistic cliche.
I can imagine a dozen things the writer might imagine that phrase imparts but it’s really nonsensical.
Why not just say you asked them?
TPM has asked the White House for a copy of the letter it sent CNN Monday.
Doesn’t that work just as well?
Brevity is a virtue.