On Monday morning, leading national press organizations and over 250 has-beens — including Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson — showed their hatred for President Trump and his voters by demanding White House correspondents and other D.C. journalists denounce President Trump to his face at this Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD).
The letter ordered attendees to “forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press” since allowing Trump to attend — an invitation extended to him by CBS’s Weijia Jiang the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) board — was “a profound contradiction of [the dinner’s] purpose” to celebrate the D.C. media’s “vital and irreplaceable role” in the First Amendment and America itself.
The letter’s first two paragraphs served up enough gag-worthy, pontifical, pretentious smarm that illustrate why Americans across the political spectrum loathe the national media’s ego believing they themselves embody the First Amendment (and not every single America) and are the bulwark to keeping the country safe (and not our military and first responders).
Incredibly, this was just one elongated sentence:
The collective weight of the administration’s actions — retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists, personal verbal attacks on reporters, assaults on the media in official White House press releases and social media posts, the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press — represent the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president.
The egotists asserted that while “[t]here is a long tradition of presidents attending the White House Correspondents Association Dinner,” exceptions must be made because “these are not normal times” and “wear[ing] pocket handkerchiefs or lapel pins with the words of the First Amendment” is insufficient.
“[W]e believe the White House Correspondents Association should take stronger action by issuing – from the podium – a forceful defense of freedom of the press and condemnation of those who threaten that freedom, followed by a standing toast to the First Amendment and a pledge to continue upholding such a critical cornerstone of our democracy,” they continued.
The letter even tried to argue they’d be pushing back against “any officeholder” who would do what Trump did, which was interesting considering Trump hasn’t prosecuted reporters the way the Obama administration did or clamped down on freedom of speech the way the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Wilson administrations did during both world wars.
Probably thinking they’re modern-day Martin Luthers penning a new 95 Theses, what followed next was 22 examples of “Trump Administration’s Attacks on Freedom of the Press.” In actuality, each bullet point contained multiple examples.
Starting with being worked up over the Gulf of Mexico name change to Gulf of America, the letter included misleading and omission-filled grievances.
These over-the-hill former reporters had one Tonka truck-sized bullet point that could be boiled down to being outraged Trump has called reporters “terrible”:
President Trump has engaged in a sustained pattern of personal verbal attacks on individual reporters, including calling ABC reporter Mary Bruce ‘a terrible person and a terrible reporter,’ calling Bloomberg News reporter Catherine Lucey ‘piggy,’ calling CBS reporter Nancy Cordes a ‘stupid person’, calling New York Times reporter Katie Rogers ‘a third-rate reporter’ and ‘ugly both inside and out,’ calling CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins ‘the worst reporter,’ calling ABC reporter Rachel Scott ‘obnoxious’ and ‘a terrible reporter, ” a pattern disproportionately targeting women journalists. Trump also threatening to revoke ABC’s broadcast license when the network’s reporters asked questions he disliked.
They also took issue with the White House creating “an official government webpage titled ‘Hall of Shame,’ naming and targeting individuals journalists and news organizations for reporting that the administration disagreed with.”
The White House made a website to call out false and biased reporting?! We’re just like North Korea!
There were predictable bullet points on the administration’s successful defunding of NPR and PBS, whining they “serve more than 999 percent of the American population, including rural communities that rely on public media for emergency and disaster information.”
Someone should ask the Texas Hill Country if NPR and PBS helped save lives last July. We, in fact, did and the answer was no.
These so-called esteemed journalists also purposefully omitted the context to two successful Trump lawsuits against ABC News and CBS’s then-parent company Paramount Global. Notice they never said why Trump sued the two organizations. In the first case, falsely saying someone was found “liable” of rape is a serious charge these supposed constitutional experts should be concerned with:
- President Trump filed a lawsuit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, which Disney — ABC’s parent company — settled for $15 million directed to the future Trump Presidential Library, plus $1 million in legal fees, a settlement that legal scholars warned would produce a chilling effect on network journalism.
- President Trump filed a lawsuit against Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, over the editing of a ‘60 Minutes’ interview. Paramount settled, paying $16 million to the future Trump Presidential Library — despite legal experts characterizing the suit as frivolous and predicting CBS would prevail at trial. The settlement came as Paramount sought FCC approval for a multibillion-dollar merger.
We’ll flag one more that was particularly comical: “Within the first hours of his second term, President Trump suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid specifically designated to support press freedom overseas.”
Six major journalism trade groups signed on, including the lead journalism organization, the Society of Professional Journalists. Keep these in mind when they try to claim they work for you: Society of Professional Journalists, National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), National Press Photographers Association, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Coalition for Women in Journalism, Radio Television Digital News Association/
Along with Donaldson and Rather, other former legacy journalists included Claire Atkinson (Murdoch family stalker), Tom Bettag (ABC), Pam Coulter (CBS), Ann Curry (NBC), Bob Faw (NBC), Charles Jaco (CNN), Jackie Judd (ABC), Rita Kempley (Washington Post), Andrea Koppel (CNN), Vicki Mabrey (ABC), Peter Maer (CBS), Kevin Newman (ABC), Bob Orr (CBS), Bill Press (CNN), Lisa Stark (ABC), and Kevin Tibbles (NBC).
