Glenn Thrush, a reporter for the New York Times, stated during a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, that people in the media “can’t do that” when it comes to boycotting White House press briefings because “we are all members of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
“Right,” co-host Joe Scarborough stated. “You’ve got to be there in case news does break.”
“Here’s the thing that I think is interesting,” Thrush said at the start of the segment. “We spent all this time talking about how [Fox News Channel host] Sean Hannity is telling Trump to shut down the briefings.”
“Right now, they’re thinking about moving us across the street, maybe into a Starbucks” outlet, the reporter noted. “That’d be good. That would be terrific.”
“Yeah,” co-host Mika Brzezinski stated, but Hannity “does have people on camera. He has [Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice] Jay Sekulow. He has Kellyanne [Conway, the president’s counselor] holding up pictures.”
At that point, Thrush chuckled, but Brzezinski retorted: “No, I’m serious. Why won’t he let the White House [officials] go on camera?”
“Because they don’t have any information to impart,” Thrush responded. “They have effectively shut down the briefing.”
That comment led the female co-host to ask: “Well, why do they have a briefing then?”
“That, I think, is a good question,” Thrush stated. “I think the reason the reporters are attending that thing is they’re waiting for the briefing to unexpectedly break out one of these days.”
Scarborough then asked: “So has there been any talk among the White House press corps to stop attending the briefings?”
“We can’t do that, I don’t think personally,” Thrush replied. “And you know that we are all members of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
“We are bound by the dictates of our institutions,” he added.
Thrush then noted:
And the other thing is that the Twitter hate we’re getting these days is why we don’t record this. We don’t record this because we go to the briefings with the expectation that we ask questions and get answers.
I am less alarmed about the video aspect about this than the fact that, as you said, we have three straight days of not answering [questions].
“I’m less alarmed by the video aspect of it, too,” Scarborough agreed. “I mean, it’s obvious the TV networks would like to have the pictures, but at the same time, it’s about the information, and unfortunately, you’re not getting any information.”
“Nobody’s getting information from the White House right now,” he added, “and you’ve got to believe a lot of it is due to the fact that people who work for Donald Trump now know that they’re going to be proven to be liars if they stick their necks out too far.”
Meanwhile, in an article on the Mediaite.com website, Jon Levine asserted: “As official White House press briefings become increasingly rare and combative, there has been growing chatter that White House correspondents might revolt and boycott the briefing altogether.”
“The idea has been alluded to by the Cable News Network’s Jim Acosta, among others,” Levine noted.
“CNN's White House correspondent is calling on his colleagues in the White House Press Corps to unite in protest over cameras sometimes being barred from daily press briefings,” Levine added.
"I think at some point some collective action ... will have to be taken," Acosta said Monday.
The problem Acosta and others have overlooked is the fact that if there are no press briefings, the reporters will probably have access to very little news, which is more than they’d get if they decide to boycott the gatherings altogether.
In addition, the Trump administration has been experimenting with other ways to conduct the briefings, such as taking questions from people via the Skype visual online service and inviting people to the gatherings from other news outlets that have not been represented in the current format.
Of course, it comes as no surprise that the people now in the “mainstream media” want to keep the briefings in the current format, which traditionally gives them more say in what news from the White House is distributed.
As a result, Thrush is correct to indicate that the persons in the media who call for a boycott might find themselves out of work if they can’t find other news to cover.
