White House press secretary Sarah Sanders criticized reporters for being too hasty to publish reports, saying that a “24-second news cycle” is undermining accuracy.
“I think there’s a real race often to be first instead of to be right, and I think that’s a dangerous place,” Sanders told C-SPAN in an interview recorded Thursday.
Sanders was responding specifically to a CBS News report that said she was preparing to leave her job. She said she was given a half-hour to comment and that she sees similarly rushed reporting on Twitter.
[Also read: Sarah Sanders: ‘A violent attack on innocent journalists doing their job is an attack on every American’]
“We used to have a 24-hour news cycle, now we’re running more like on a 24-second news cycle, and I think that’s a dangerous place because there’s not the same editorial process that stories go through before they go live,” she said.
“I think oftentimes people, reporters will use Twitter to comment on a story and they don’t realize that could be taken as news because they are a reporter,” she added. “And those are fast turnarounds, and there’s not an editorial process that those things go through.”
Sanders also told C-SPAN that she believes White House press briefings still “can be” useful. Her predecessor Sean Spicer has a different stance, recently telling the Washington Examiner that briefings are “not serving a constructive purpose anymore.”
Sanders said, however, the briefings “have become more at times about trying to have a gotcha moment or a breakout moment maybe for a reporter rather than trying to get information.”
She declined to identify specific camera-mugging journalists, saying, “I think everybody who’s tuned in can figure that one out on their own.”
