Most people think their own jobs are hard, but journalists never tire of letting people know just how crucial theirs is and how under appreciated they are.
The public, as when listening to a friend who’s always complaining, rolls its eyes.
President Trump and his team like to attack news media. America has been through more than a year of that and so his aggressions have become a fact of life, like the sun rising in the East, the force of gravity and Keith Olbermann’s uncanny ability to still find work.
On Friday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer hosted the daily press briefing but only invited select news outlets into his office for it, rather than hosting it in the traditional briefing room with every credentialed outlet allowed.
Among those excluded were the New York Times, CNN and the Los Angeles Times. The briefing also wasn’t on camera, as it normally is.
Spicer said before the inauguration that he would do something like this from time to time. It wasn’t controversial then and it isn’t now.
But sensing an existential threat in not being able to ask the White House about things Trump says on Twitter, the media’s survival instincts kicked in.
“This is not okay,” said CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin.
Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery appealed to the nobility of his profession and said that “no one should have attended this while others excluded this way.”
(Reporters should remember that the next time the Post gets an exclusive it didn’t share with the rest of them.)
Earlier that day at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said the media “shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use someone’s name” and that any anonymous source who wants to criticize him in a news report, “Let them say it to my face.”
While attendees laughed and applauded, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza felt his livelihood had been molested and called Trump’s mock proposal “a clearly unconstitutional ban on anonymous sources.”
And during his marathon of a press conference last week, Trump accused the news media of harboring “hatred” and making up “fake news.”
He told a CNN reporter that his network was being downgraded from “fake news” to “very fake news.” Even the reporter, Jim Acosta, laughed.
NBC “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd, freedom’s compass, called Trump’s comments “un-American.”
Every time Trump insults the national media, the public is made to endure a lecture on how important reporters are, how meaningful their place in society is.
But at this point, it’s like seeing someone from work posting selfies on social media. We get it.
Trump hasn’t done a single thing to limit press freedom, though he has shown a personal delight in overseeing the inevitable emotional breakdown every time he calls the media “fake.”
Everyone else watches this play out, mildly amused and entirely indifferent to how invalidated Trump’s insults make reporters feel.
People are too busy with their own jobs to worry about the media’s.
Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner.
