The White House Press Corps is Objectively Vengeful

And they all feed off of each other

Jul 15, 2024

Note: I have thoughts about all the social media disinformation surrounding the assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday. And I have thoughts about the legacy media choices in covering it. But I am going to let those thoughts percolate for a few days and send out a midweek update on Wednesday.

This week, I’m looking at the media group-think shown in its reaction to Biden’s debate debacle.

Back in 1988, when I was a part-timer at the Middlesex News, I covered a panel on education. One of the panelists was a legislator whose name I don’t remember. But when I interviewed her after the panel, she suggested that Massachusetts should change it’s funding formula for education, relying less on property taxes, which were capped at that time.

This was an unexpected answer, but not the lede of the story I wrote when I got back to the office. The legislator was floating the idea, getting a conversation started. She knew she was talking to a journalist, though. This wasn’t just idle conversation I had picked up in the lobby.

So, I put her comment somewhere around paragraph five, as I started to write about the funding challenges.

The weekend night editor - who was not much older than I was - cut it.

“Did she say she was bringing legislation,” he asked me.

“No,” I answered, “she was floating the idea.”

“But it’s not likely to happen,” he said.

“Is it our job only to print what we think is likely to happen,” I answered.

He got mad at that. The comment never ran.

The Bandwagon Effect

I’ve been thinking about this exchange this week as I’ve watched the D.C. and New York press go into a feeding frenzy on Biden, and ignore the criticism as to why editorial boards didn’t call for Trump to get out of the race. Trump has, after all, been showing signs of mental decline more than Biden, with his riffs on sharks and electrocution, among other things, and his slurring of words.

The New York Times was out with an editorial the day after the debate asking Biden to resign. Seemingly in answer, the next day the Philadelphia Inquirer ran an editorial calling for Donald Trump to leave the race.

The Inquirer wrote:

“But lost in the hand wringing [about Biden’s debate performance] was Donald Trump’s usual bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering. His performance demonstrated once again that he is a danger to democracy and unfit for office.

“In fact, the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.”

Poynter Institute senior media writer Tom Jones channelled my old Middlesex News editor in his response to this differentiated treatment of Biden and Trump.

“…to the question of why aren’t more media outlets asking that Trump leave the race, there’s a simple answer,” Jones wrote.

"It isn’t going to happen. It’s an unrealistic proposal. Trump is not going to leave the race, and his party doesn’t want him to. Barring something unforeseen and despite whatever threat he might pose, Trump will be the Republican nominee come November.”

It’s not going to happen, so we shouldn’t do our jobs?

To be fair, this past Friday, July 12, the New York Times DID publish a 5-part editorial on why Trump is unfit to lead.

The bullet-pointed version:

He is dangerous in word, deed and action
He puts self over country
He loathes the laws we live by

This is a good start. Perhaps The Times is beginning to understand that you can’t cover Trump like a regular candidate.

Nah, who am I kidding.

Back in 2016, NPR reporters were told that if they reported Trump lied, they also had to report that Clinton lied. Many of them balked. “But what if Clinton doesn’t lie,” one of them asked.

After the second debate in October, my co-host at the time wrote that false equivalence into our show opening. As we were recording it that morning, I stopped.

“What did Hillary lie about?”

“I don’t know,” came the answer.

“We can’t say that she lied just because he lied. That doesn’t make sense.”

He huffed.

“Fine, we’ll take it out.”

For my part, I was dumbfounded that the press wasn’t going crazy about the predatory nature of Trump’s body language during that debate. The Guardian was one of the few outlets to put it in context, with reporting like this brilliant video compilation.

But most of my colleagues went with headlines like NBC’s: “Trump Accused of ‘Stalking’ Clinton on Stage.”

And yet, Biden was not “accused” of being out of it during the debate last month. The press immediately concluded he WAS out of it - as we all did.

It was as obvious as Trump’s stalking of Clinton.

My First Scrum

The other thing I experienced when I was at the Middlesex News in the late 1980s was a presidential campaign press conference with Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis, of course, was the highly popular governor of Massachusetts. He was running against then-Vice-President George H. W. Bush for president. This was the campaign that was so racist that Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater apologized on his deathbed just a few years later. This is the campaign where the name Willie Horton was put into presidential history. This is the campaign in which, at the start of one of the debates, CNN’s Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis if he would be for the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, was raped and murdered.

Which is totally not an objective question, in case you’re wondering. It clearly indicates that men aren’t men unless they want vengeance.

Before that debate, though, came the Pledge of Allegiance controversy.

Eleven years before, it turned out, Dukakis had vetoed a bill requiring school children to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had noted it was unconstitutional.

But Bush and Atwater, and even Ronald Reagan, decided this would be a good thing to run on. This was three decades before the Supreme Court and the folks at Project 2025 went a long way toward making the speech part of the First Amendment moot.

So, I went to the press conference, which was held at a prison that I had written about previously, and stood in back, taking it all in.

There were probably a hundred reporters there. And every single one that got to ask a question asked about the Pledge of Allegiance. Dukakis would answer them, and there would be a murmur, then reporters would shout out their questions. All of them about the Pledge.

This was the first scrum I had witnessed. The first time a group of people who would swear their objectivity got together to rev each other up into a non-objective mob.

The Mob Mentality

Which brings me to the temper tantrum displayed by CBS White House Correspondent Ed O’Keefe, accusing Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre of holding back information. (Watch the video; it’s pretty short.)

I had seen New York Times White House Correspondent Peter Baker make this same accusation a few months ago on the 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle. Frustrated as the segment drew to a close, Baker yelled, “He won’t give us an interview!”

The implication was that since Biden wasn’t as accessible as the press wanted him to be, he was hiding something.

There was no such sustained outrage when the Trump administration stopped having press conferences, much less letting Trump do interviews.

And so it was, on July 8, that Peter Baker co-wrote a story about a neurologist who specializes in Parkinson’s disease being at the White house eight times in the last eight months.

The story is one big insinuation. The neurologist must be there for Biden, even though Biden was not even in Washington for most of those dates the doctor was at the White House.

A point which Baker did not report.

The White House press corps - who clearly agreed with Baker that the Biden team has been hiding something - went crazy. They could not accept that the doctor in question was there for other white house staff.

I noted two things about the press corp’s response. One is that O’Keefe said that they “are all miffed around here about how information has been shared.”

The other is that when every reporter in that room filed their stories - even when they clarified the erroneous Times report that the doctor wasn’t there to see Biden - they used it as an opportunity to take a swipe at Press Secretary Jean-Pierre.

This is the same mob mentality I saw in 1988. This is the same mob mentality that led the Times to conclude in 2016 that Clinton must be guilty of something, and they were going to prove it by digging into her emails and the Clinton Foundation.

If it doesn’t comport to their gut feeling, it has to be wrong. And they will tell each other that over and over again, till they are as sure of their gut as they are that the earth is round.

Meanwhile, the country suffers.