Working journalists aren’t saying that what we do toiling in the news vineyards has the lyrical insight of Emily Dickinson, the passion of Malcolm X, the prose style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
We just write the first rough drafts of history day in and day out, and many do it well, or well enough. We have been trained, either at university or in the harder school of the newsroom, to do the work: research the issues, ask the right questions of the knowledgeable or the powerful, cultivate sources, pound out what we have learned on the keyboards, meet that deadline. If it’s fairly simple in the end, so are many honorable things.
It was our small pride in our work and how we do it that made it either hilarious or cringe-making or end-of-days indicating — take your choice — to witness kooky amateurs take over the real journalists’ seats in the Pentagon press briefing room during a news conference because all the actual reporting organizations — very much including Fox News — have declined to sign a Trump White House document promising not to report the news anymore.
That’s an exaggeration. What we have declined to sign is a pledge to not report any news about the Pentagon without prior authorization from the Defense Department, even if it is unclassified, and not to “solicit government employees to violate the law” by providing confidential information. Credentialed reporters were asked to promise not to wander around talking to people, which is what we do for a living.
No one would sign it: none of the TV and radio networks, the newspapers, the wire services, the national magazines. So all the real journalists lost their Pentagon press credentials.
Last Tuesday, the White House invited a bunch of weirdos in to take the actual scribes’ seats at a defense briefing. “Welcome to the Department of War,” said Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson. Surveying the crowd of goofball amateurs, she continued : “Legacy media chose to self-deport from this building. The American people don’t trust these propagandists because they stopped telling the truth.”
Such a lover of the truth, she proceeded to call on disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz, the underage-girl guy, who ridiculously was wearing a jacket with “Representative Matt Gaetz” still stitched on it, who wondered if, once Trump orders the Army into Venezuela, it would “take the view that any person who served in the Venezuelan military or Venezuelan government is definitionally a narcoterrorist.”
Then, to accelerate the hilarity, it was time for wacky Laura Loomer, the “pro-white nationalist” and “proud Islamophobe,” to play reporter. She used her precious time to go off on a bender about the Qatari emir and family, with whom Trump is quite friendly, seeing as how they are giving him a big jet plane, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which Trump wants to declare “a foreign terrorist organization.”
Press secretary wouldn’t bite: “That would be a determination for the president to make,” Wilson responded. “But I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narco terrorist.” OK, then — nice change of subject!
Then matters took a further turn toward the bizarre: “an unknown briefing attendee pushed back on Loomer’s question, asking whether the U.S. was reassessing its relationship with Israel after asserting that the ‘Israeli government funded Hamas,’” the New York Post reported.
If the New York Post doesn’t know who a reactionary conspiracy theorist is, nobody does.
This, gentle reader, is the same administration that every single day calls the responsible press such as the newspaper you are now perusing “fake news.” But you can see just how far it has gone in demonizing the truth when I tell you that even far-right broadcaster Newsmax won’t sign the Pentagon pledge, calling it “unnecessary and onerous.” Troubled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gloats: “Press no longer roams free.” The rest of us have to live in the nation where for the first time in 250 years, that’s true.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.