McEnany slams reporters for not asking about spike in violence across US
Fox News media analyst Howard Kurtz says reporters 'tend to follow the president's lead.'
With so many vital issues swirling across the political landscape, the press secretary’s briefing was dominated by one topic.
It began when NBC’s Peter Alexander asked: “Why is the president so supportive of flying the Confederate flag?”
And other than a handful of questions on the coronavirus, reporters followed up again and again and again.
This was triggered by President Trump’s Monday tweet, which instantly eclipsed his holiday speeches and prompted such Republican loyalists as Lindsey Graham to distance themselves:
“Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX? That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!”
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A few points: NASCAR’s only fulltime black driver didn’t initiate the probe of a noose found in his stall, which turned out not to have been targeted at Bubba. NASCAR’s ratings aren’t down. And the president was clearly critical of the league’s decision to ban the Confederate flag at its races.
The torrent in the briefing room continued:
“Kayleigh, to follow on Peter’s question, what is the president's position? Does he think NASCAR made a mistake by banning the Confederate flag?”
“But let’s drill down on the Confederate flag. Does he think it was a mistake for NASCAR to ban it?”
McEnany said “the president said he wasn’t making a judgment one way or the other. You’re focusing on--”
“But what is his position on it?
“--one word at the very bottom of a tweet that’s completely taken out of context and neglecting the complete rush to judgment on this.”
There was more:
“Wasn’t he saying that NASCAR’s ratings were down because they banned the flag? That’s what he said.”
“Has he considered banning the Confederate flag from Trump rallies?”
“And just to follow up on the NASCAR thing,” a reporter read the Trump tweet. “How are we misinterpreting that?”
“I’m not going to answer a question a sixth time.”
“But you haven’t answered that question.”
“Kayleigh, what exactly does the president see as positive or uniting then about the Confederate flag?”
“Why can't this White House unambiguously state whether or not it supports displays of the Confederate flag?”
Now it would be easy to say the media are utterly obsessed with this issue. It fuels the journalistic narrative that the president is stoking white resentment with his attacks on angry mobs and left-wing fascism, not to mention his threat to veto a major defense bill if it renames bases that honor Confederate generals.
What’s more, the reporters were frustrated by McEnany’s repeated insistence that Trump has no position on displaying Confederate flags.
But most of all, the contretemps reflects the president’s decision to drive the news cycle through Twitter.
Since that social network is the primary way he communicates with his 83 million followers, Trump has the power to change the national conversation with a couple of sentences. Sometimes this chokes off positive coverage he had been getting, to the dismay of his advisers, and sometimes it helps him turn the page from negative coverage.
But the White House can’t very well complain that journalists are creating a distraction when they covering the president’s own words, not when he has used Twitter to make major announcements, push policies, attack opponents and otherwise generate headlines.
There are many well-documented instances of Trump stunning his top aides by tweeting a big decision that they thought they were still debating.
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National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who slammed media coverage of Trump’s July 4 speeches as unfair and unhinged, posted this: “Step 1) Deliver an excellent speech. Step 2) Step all over it with a stupid and indefensible tweet.”
McEnany, for her part, chose to end the briefing with this scolding of her press corps:
“I'm a little dismayed that I didn’t receive one question on the deaths that we got in this country this weekend. I didn’t receive one question about New York City shootings doubling for the third straight week. And over the last seven days, shootings skyrocketed by 142 percent. Not one question. I didn’t receive one question about five children who were killed.”
That’s a fair point. The carnage in New York, Chicago and other cities, including fatal shootings of young children, has been devastating.
Maybe journalists consider urban violence a decades-old tragedy that is limited to the worst neighborhoods. Maybe they’re more focused on the pandemic, the economy and the election. Maybe they don’t want to take on the Democratic mayors who run most of these cities. Maybe they find it a depressing and intractable problem.
Perhaps that would change if President Trump tweeted about it more--and proposed some solutions.
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