Did you get an invite to the White House for a lunch with the president before he delivers his State of the Union address on Tuesday?
Wow, me neither. Bummer.
But we’re apparently supposed to care deeply that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper didn’t get their own invites to the lunch, even though most other major TV news anchors did.
Democratic operative and Fox News contributor Donna Brazile reacted to the news as though it were an assault on the First Amendment. “Terrible,” she said on Twitter. “When will journalists come together to protect the 1st Amendment and their colleagues on the front lines. @wolfblitzer is a honorable man. It’s Trump who should end his vindictiveness and pettiness.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democratic, tweeted, “Solidarity needs to be modeled by news organizations here in the US for the sake of free press.”
The lunch has nothing to do with press freedoms. It’s an annual, off-the-record, private event where the president, whoever it is, previews what he plans to say that night and otherwise shoots the bull.
Because the public doesn’t get to see any of it and because it’s off the record, we’re not supposed to know anything at all about what goes on during the meal.
Trump is certainly singling out CNN because he doesn’t like the channel’s coverage, but so what? This doesn’t affect CNN’s ability to cover the news. And Trump doesn’t care for MSNBC, ABC, CBS, or NBC either, and yet all of them will have people there.
Maybe I’ll care about Blitzer and Cooper when I get my own invite.
