On her 12:00 p.m. ET hour show on Monday, MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell rushed to defend PBS NewsHour correspondent Yamiche Alcindor’s hostile questioning of President Trump during Sunday evening’s Coronavirus Task Force briefing. Mitchell condemned the President’s “unsettling” push-back against the liberal reporter and hailed Alcindor as “dignified and persistent.”
“And one of the things that was so unsettling last night at the news conference was the way he once again treated Yamiche Alcindor....who questions him with tough, accurate questions,” Mitchell bemoaned. After playing a clip of the contentious exchange at the presser, she further declared: “You know, he slammed her inaccurately, personally. She was dignified and persistent and completely accurate in her questioning. This is sort of a repeated exercise there, and it’s troubling to people.”
Washington Post reporter and host of PBS’s Washington Week, Robert Costa, predictably doubled down on Mitchell’s assessment:
Yamiche is a good friend and colleague at PBS. She handled herself, as she always does, like a professional. And my advice to her, publicly and privately, and to any reporter who confronts people in power, is to keep asking questions, particularly when people in power say they need you to act positively. It’s not the job of a reporter to be positive or negative. It’s the job of a reporter to be vigorous and at times tough when people are in crisis, when nations are looking for information, when people need journalism to be at its fully functioning best. And Yamiche Alcindor exemplified that in the Rose Garden. And as a member of the press, I salute her for continuing to just do her job, and that's what we’re trying to do here, is do our job.
While Costa’s description of how journalists should conduct themselves is completely correct, it bears no resemblance to how reporters actually behave.
Mitchell smugly concluded: “And it’s exactly how we’ve seen the President back down on some of his earlier pronouncements, after the press, the governors, and the doctors have pushed back on it.”
Appearing on MSNBC shortly after the press conference dust-up, Alcindor proudly proclaimed that bashing Trump during White House briefings was a “team sport” among the press corps.
Here is a transcript of Mitchell’s March 30 exchange with Costa:
12:39 PM ET
(...)
ANDREA MITCHELL: And one of the things that was so unsettling last night at the news conference was the way he once again treated Yamiche Alcindor, your colleague, our colleague and friend, who questions him with tough, accurate questions. She was trying to raise a question about what he had said to Sean Hannity about New York not needing 40,000 ventilators. Let me play a little bit of that.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR: You’ve said repeatedly that you think that some of the equipment that governors are requesting, they don’t actually need. You said New York might not need 30,000 –
DONALD TRUMP: I didn’t say that.
ALCINDOR: You said it on Sean Hannity’s Fox News. You said that you might –
TRUMP: Why don’t you people act – let me ask you – why don’t you act in a little more positive? It’s always trying to get you, get you, get you. And you know what, that’s why nobody trusts the media anymore.
ALCINDOR: My question to you is how is that going to impact –
TRUMP: Excuse me, you didn’t hear me. That’s why you used to work for the Times and now you work for somebody else.
MITCHELL: You know, he slammed her inaccurately, personally. She was dignified and persistent and completely accurate in her questioning. This is sort of a repeated exercise there, and it’s troubling to people.
ROBERT COSTA [WASHINGTON POST]: Yamiche is a good friend and colleague at PBS. She handled herself, as she always does, like a professional. And my advice to her, publicly and privately, and to any reporter who confronts people in power, is to keep asking questions, particularly when people in power say they need you to act positively. It’s not the job of a reporter to be positive or negative. It’s the job of a reporter to be vigorous and at times tough when people are in crisis, when nations are looking for information, when people need journalism to be at its fully functioning best. And Yamiche Alcindor exemplified that in the Rose Garden. And as a member of the press, I salute her for continuing to just do her job, and that's what we’re trying to do here, is do our job.
MITCHELL: Thank you so much, Robert Costa. And it’s exactly how we’ve seen the President back down on some of his earlier pronouncements, after the press, the governors, and the doctors have pushed back on it.
(...)
