Sarah Sanders is no longer at the White House, but that has not dimmed her disdain for some of the men and women who served opposite her in the press pool.
“We laughed about the fact that there were some people that sat in [the White House press briefing room] for 15 years and no one has ever heard of them and no one ever knew who they were until they got into a fight with Donald Trump’s press secretary,” Sanders said in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito at the Washington Examiner Political Summit in Sea Island, Georgia.
“Now they have TV deals, and book deals, and they’re hitting the speaking circuit,” the former White House press secretary said. “And you could see people kind of decide that this was their moment, and this was where they were going to kind of make their stand.”
Sanders mentioned early in her conversation with Zito that she did not want to name names. But there was an exception.
“I’ll use one example: Jim Acosta,” Sanders said, adding that she’s “not concerned about his career, honestly.
“It was people like that that I think gave the press a bad name. And they really took away so much from the good reporters and the real reporters that were there trying to do their jobs well,” she said. “And I think he really kind of spoiled a lot of things for a lot of people. Because when people outside of Washington think about the press, a lot of them think about him instead of some of those really good reporters that were sitting in the room next to him that weren’t grandstanding and weren’t trying to build a brand and become the story but just write the story.”
I cannot argue with that. Acosta’s showboating has served only to advance his own career goals, and it has come at the expense of serious and dedicated reporters such as CBS News’ Mark Knoller, who stands out in my mind as the ideal White House correspondent. From meticulously transcribing quotes to keeping close tabs on the commander in chief’s daily schedule, Knoller puts in the hard work of detailing everything he sees while covering the White House, regardless of party or president and all of it divorced from his personal commentary. Acosta, on the other hand, is the sort of person to recite poetry during a White House press briefing on immigration policy.
If you are a serious journalist or even a casual news consumer, you should share Sanders’ distaste for the showboating fame-seekers of the White House press corps. They do nothing to serve the public’s interest, and they actively distract from the efforts of reporters who are actually trying to hold the powerful accountable.
