How do we stop the media from talking about itself?

The White House press corps ouroboros

If there’s one thing worse than a journalist writing about the media, it’s a journalist writing about other journalists writing about the media. Cockburn hopes you can forgive him for this gross transgression – but White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend seems as good a time as any to take stock of the very odd relationship between reporters who cover the White House and the President’s press shop.

Take Donie O’Sullivan’s CNN segment this week on “Trump-friendly journalists,” in which he speaks to LindellTV’s Cara Castronuova, Real America’s Voice Brian Glenn (aka Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend) and, of course, War Room’s Natalie Winters, who he groups together as “MAGA Media.”

“These are White House correspondents like you’ve never seen before,” O’Sullivan snidely begins. Winters tells O’Sullivan that she’s at the White House “reporting on not so much the White House, but the media.” Now CNN is at the White House, reporting on her reporting on the media… 

In one eyebrow-raising part of the clip, O’Sullivan – who regularly covers “disinformation” for his network – asks if Winters considers herself a journalist. “Yes,” she says.

Winters also responds to claims that more “traditional” members of the White House press corps might be displeased to share the Briefing Room with her. “Well I’m pretty sure the group of people in there spent, what was it, four years covering for someone who was essentially dead – and that’s being charitable,” she says. “So to all those people who are apoplectic about having new media voices: you guys failed and that’s why we’re here.”

“They cut out the other part of my answer to the question,” Winters told Cockburn, recounting how she’d told Sullivan how “Joe Biden had his own new media initiative and that was government-funded censorship of the American people. But if you put that in a new media briefing seat, that’s probably not going to go over as well.”

“Would you rather have it in your face and be done aboveboard,” Winters wondered aloud, “or have this weird sort of clandestine covert operation that is behind-the-scenes laundering questions, purposely revoking press passes, knowing that no one else is going to cover it?”

O’Sullivan also asks whether Winters’s outlet would call Trump out if there are points of disagreement. “Yeah, and we have, time and time again,” she replies, “particularly on the vertical and issue of immigration. We are not for stapling green cards to diplomas–” The clip then abruptly cuts to his voiceover. “They cut the H-1B stuff,” Winters told Cockburn.

“I’ve interviewed government officials and I pressed them on the mass deportation stuff,” Winters continued. “I call it ‘the horseshoe theory of opposition questions’: in the same way that the legacy media only wants to talk about immigration and the lack of deportation numbers to try to get a ‘gotcha’ question against Trump, we want to actually know the answer on how to solve it.”

The CNN segment follows hot on the heels of Politico’s listicle, “Meet the 8 MAGA Outlets Disrupting the White House Briefing Room.” They include Glenn, Castronuova and speak to Winters – who Ian Ward dubs “the enfant terrible of the ‘new media’ set” – and, bizarrely, gift their readers a picture of her feet. Anything for search traffic. Ward also lumps in Mary Margaret Olohan of the Daily Wire, Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell of the Daily Signal, Daniel Baldwin of One America News, Monica Paige Luisi of Turning Point USA and Matt Boyle of Breitbart.

“The occupants of the conservative corner cut a sharp contrast to their seated colleagues,” Ward writes. “Their fashion choices — flashy ties and steep high heels – stand out in the sea of gray suits and sensible flats.”

Then there was the sprawling, quadruple-bylined New York Times interactive article taking readers “Inside the Changing White House Briefing Room.” The Gray Lady gripes that press secretary Karoline Leavitt has allowed more right-of-center outlets to line the aisles of the Briefing Room and given them a quarter of the questions.

“During Mr. Trump’s first term, the administration’s primary method of controlling the briefings was to hold them very rarely,” the Times reports. “This time, the administration has made moves to insert itself into the day-to-day workings of the press corps that covers it.” Naturally there is no mention of what the press policy was between the two Trump administrations.

“I reached out to the Biden White House – and the Biden campaign – probably hundreds of times with press inquiries over the past four years,” Olohan told Cockburn. “The only person who ever answered me was Andrew Bates — and he would merely mock me.”

“Some of those along the perimeter have asked questions more favorable to the administration or have echoed right-wing talking points,” the Times writes. “Mary Margaret Olohan, of the conservative site the Daily Wire, has been called on seven times.” How dare they.

“The point of these pieces is to suggest that we don’t deserve to be in the room – and that legacy outlets, with their facade of complete impartiality, are the only worthy briefing-room occupants,” Olohan told Cockburn. “I take their labels about as seriously as the American people take their reporting.”

It would be sensible for Cockburn to issue a plea for a return to normalcy: a Fourth Estate that advocates for the American people, a press team that answers questions from left, right and center, a president who doesn’t need either faction to cover for him. But really: don’t we get the media coverage we deserve?

“They’re the ones that are writing like 18 fucking stories about it every day,” Winters said. “For them to not have invited anyone from the new media stuff onto any of their shows, like the legacy cable shows, to discuss it and defend it, I think is very weird.”

On our radar

COURT OUT The FBI arrested a Milwaukee judge Friday after accusing her of obstructing immigration enforcement when they came to apprehend an illegal migrant at her courthouse.

ATLANTIC CROSSING President Trump sat for an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker. Trump said he was participating “out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’”

BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR The Trump administration is set to relax rules on self-driving vehicles and slacken crash reporting requirements.

Diva down

The latest episode in the saga of George Santos is, as his old colleague Matt Gaetz put it, “Mr. Santos goes to prison.”

The colorful former congressman has been sentenced to seven years in jail after pleading guilty to schemes that included wrongly receiving unemployment benefits during the coronavirus pandemic and lying on House financial forms.

Ahead of a move from the US House to the big house, Santos fears retaliation from prison gangs and MS-13. Sending the former Brazilian drag queen to jail is like “putting a hen in a fox hole,” he warned. Perhaps Trump could deport him to Brazil?

Now only Trump can save him. Santos must be peeved that Trump has been pardoning other longtime political allies, including one who paid for cosmetic surgery with funds intended to honor a slain officer.

Santos “may have pled guilty to fraud, but we still don’t know the full extent of the fraud he perpetrated and how big the fallout from this will be,” a New York political veteran mused to Cockburn.

“Will his sentence be a deterrent for future potential phonies, or is it merely highlighting how a small punishment can lead to international fame? Have the political systems put any safeguards in place to assure another ‘George Santos’ doesn’t happen?” We wait and see…