Issues & Insights Editorial Board, TIPP Insights
Earlier this week, we outlined the media’s habit of acting like school kids in regard to climate change alarm. Today we’re asking members of the legacy press to behave as adults rather than spoiled children. We don’t expect them to.
Many in the White House press corp, exclusively those from the mainstream media, treat the briefing room as if it’s their playpen. For the last 19 years, the White House Correspondents’ Association has dictated the seating arrangement, so the “cool kids” always get the best seats.
Prior to 2006, seating was arranged by the administration’s press secretary, and it looks as if that is going to be the case again. The legacy media representatives who had become accustomed to sitting in the front rows are being moved toward the back, while those from newer media are being moved forward.
The childish response to this has been the threat of a sit-in, “in which members would return to their old seats and refuse to leave them.” Or in other words, if the toddler journalists don’t get their way, the privilege they’ve grown accustomed to, they’re going to hold their breath until they turn blue.
While some are being required to play musical chairs, the Associated Press was disinvited. It lost its access to the White House press pool. So “the WHCA asked members to support the AP’s press access case by wearing a 1st Amendment pin when attending events at the White House and appearing on television,” reports Semafor. This is risible, because the mainstream press no longer believes in the First Amendment. It believes its job is to further the Democratic Party’s agenda and if that requires censorship, then that’s just the way it is.
This is no way for adults to act, especially if they want to be taken seriously. And it’s just another instance in a long line of puerile behavior that includes:
- CNN ego Jim Acosta pushing the arm of a White House aide merely doing her job so that he wouldn’t have to give up a microphone that didn’t belong to him. It was the most infantile display ever seen from a media figure during a presidential news conference.
- As a CNN reporter – yes, another one – was standing in front of a burning car in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in riot-torn 2020, the network’s chyron at the bottom of the screen said “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”
- The New York Times has elected to distance itself and keep the Pulitzers it was given from its error-riddled and intentionally divisive 1619 Project, its pro-Soviet propaganda dispatches from Walter Duranty in 1931 and its misleading reporting on Trump-Russia collusion hoax that didn’t exist.
- ABC’s Martha Raddatz trying to justify Tren de Aragua’s takeover of apartments in Colorado while ridiculing the Trump administration’s crackdown on violent illegals, because it was just a “handful” of buildings that the gang had captured.
- A number Washington Post staffers huffing out their resignations because they were offended that the newspaper’s owner had the audacity to ask them to do their jobs his way.
- National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher last week distancing herself from tweets she sent in 2020. Her doozies – such as “America begins in black plunder and white democracy,” the country is “addicted to white supremacy” and “I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me)” – sounded as if they had been concocted by a high school junior trying to appear smart – and hip.
If the media were concerned about their approval ratings hitting historic lows, they would reflect on their behavior. But like children, they’d rather pitch a fit.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
Read Part 1 here: Media, Please Grow Up
