Remember on Tuesday when reporter, Playboy contributor, and executive editor for Sentinel Newspapers, Brian Karem yelled at Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for ripping the news media for their shoddy coverage? Cortney wrote about it, but here’s what he said and why he said it, according to The Washington Post. He said doesn’t like bullies:
Reporter goes after Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sanders after she spent several minutes decrying "fake news" and anonymous sources pic.twitter.com/abaGGg0q4j
— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) June 27, 2017
I don’t like bullies and I don’t like the entire situation of the press and free speech being castigated for no other reason than we either get stories wrong — which happens, and it should be then responsibly corrected — or because we report news the president doesn’t like — which seems to happen even more often than getting stories wrong,” Karem, executive editor of two Maryland newspapers, wrote in a column [for Playboy] explaining his outburst during the Tuesday briefing.
Sanders was in the middle of blasting the media, specifically the use of anonymous sources and the now-retracted CNN story on Russia ties with the Trump campaign, when Karem interjected.
BRIAN KAREM: Come on, you’re inflaming everybody right here, right now with those words. This administration has done that as well. Why in the name of heavens — any one of us, right, are replaceable. And any one of us, if we don’t get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us.
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think —
KAREM: You have been elected to serve for four years at least. There’s no option other than that.
SANDERS: I think —
KAREM: We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers and what you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say ‘see once again, the president is right and everybody else out here is fake media.’ And everybody in this room is only trying to do their job
Now, after all of that, Karem admitted on CNN, that the Trump administration has done things to make the White House more transparent.
“They have brought in Cabinet members. They do conduct briefings. They have introduced a Skype component so people outside of the beltway can ask questions. All of that is supportive of the First Amendment,” he said. So, at the end of the day, it’s all about not liking the criticism being lobbed at you from within the White House. Well, that’s something the press corps is just going to have to deal with, especially CNN’s Jim Acosta, who is having a meltdown over the stringent new caveats on the press briefings, specifically the no-camera, no-audio rule that he feels is lurching democracy into darkness, or something.
CNN’s Acosta: There’s Been an ‘Erosion of Our Freedoms in Terms of Covering the President’ https://t.co/ZY3eDyq8dg (VIDEO) pic.twitter.com/Xd3J7MYgeM
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) June 28, 2017
Sarah Huckabee Sanders taking questions from reporters at WH briefing. Video of this has been banned by the USA. pic.twitter.com/DnErI7zudG
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 28, 2017
Take a chill pill, dude.