I’d ask the Washington press corps if they knew how ridiculous they looked at the time, but I’m reminded that Eugene Daniels is currently the president of the White House Correspondents ‘ Association ( WHCA ).
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump presidency, announced this week that the White House would be in charge of selecting a rolling staff of writers to support the president on-site and in person, a process that was originally controlled by the WHCA. It was greeted by Washington with octane-infused panic, particularly and reliably by region journalists who were still persuaded that they controlled the world, as with every news from this leadership.
The WHCA’s declaration on the subject was great fun. Eugene Daniels remarked,” This action savages the right to a free press in the United States,” apparently using coral-toned fingers. It recommends that the government selects journalists to support the president.  , In a free country, officials may not be able to choose their own media corps”.
It’s impossible to take this seriously. Not just because Daniels frequently appears in public while sporting freaky outfits and asking for advice on how to use feminine cosmetics. Not because he frequently makes a point on cable news by holding his hands close to his neck to artistically ape viewers with the striking shade he’s used to paint his fingernails.
While we’re on the subject, while, Daniels and his people assessment are crucial to this problem. He’s not built like some graceful dancing dance, he’s a hulking determine with an african and hair. He even showed up at the annual White House Correspondents ‘ Dinner event last year while wearing a sleeve-inducing sash draped over his shoulder, sort of like a drag queen Star Wars performance. Practically speaking, his social media posts are meant to make you think,” This man can’t be for real. ” Dear Black people, kindly aid”! In 2022 Daniels published an article about X. I’m searching for a new cap to put my feet in. I wanted to stay awake all night and not have a toothache, lol.
This is who the public’s most prominent body in Washington chose to represent their objectives. It’s as if they’re brave people to move to them with booking. They want to refer to you as a discriminatory homophobe.
In mid-July 2024, Daniels was appointed WHCA president, just as Kamala Harris was a de facto Democrat presidential nominee. This was a strange coincidence given that Daniels had spent the last three years as Team Kamala’s go-to propagandist for almost everything that intended to portray Harris in a positive light ( which Daniels would dutifully publish in Politico ). The multimedia news release Poynter dubbed Daniels” Politico’s Kamala Harris professional”. I doubt he felt a flutter of guilt.
The idea that the WHCA is in any method the standard bearer of a “free click” is what makes the broader WHCA show so clearly immoral. It’s no. The association’s most good criticism is that it is a congenial group of frightening nerds who, under the leadership of a happy gender-bender, hold half the country’s population in contempt for brave to cast ballots against Democratic priorities.
A more accurate analysis would be that the WHCA is yet another anti-democratic gate-keeping agency that is focused on upholding the status quo in Washington, as well as the dying media’s impact in dictating the boundaries of social conversation. The Washington media uses Eugene Daniels as its delicious hero to express its disgust with the rest of the nation.
For the uninitiated, the WHCA is the firm that, until Tuesday’s statement, worked with the White House to control the limited lake of reporters who keep close closeness to the president each day and submit his activities. Although it’s potentially a useful association, the WHCA has long been incredibly selective about who can join in the pools, slow-walking the entrance of alternative media outlets, and then implicitly and explicitly enforcing Washington conformity of the publications and TV networks covering the White House.
The purpose of Trump’s White House taking control of the pools, which may ultimately now have a wider range of reporters with other perspectives on what’s deemed significant, is to break up that disastrous conformity. However, the permanent Washington regime is at odds with alternative viewpoints and a wider range.
Everything about the” Resistance” is in gate-keeping: the online censorship, the opposition to “unqualified” cabinet appointees, the “fact-checking”, the “experts”, the “science”, and on and on. The through line is Washington’s existing power structure, including the WHCA, selecting who gets any degree of meaningful influence. They value gate-keeping above all else, and they detest to see it go.
A future Democrat will stack the pool with amiable journalists, according to the WHCA leadership, including board member Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News ( aw, they let Fox News have a seat ). ” You would not have trusted the any]sic ] Democratic admin to pick its own pool”, Henrich wrote on X of Trump supporters,” but now that door is open. Just wait until a Dem administration plays that exact game. You’ll hate it”.
Hilarious. Democrats have relied on the Washington press corps for decades for frank reporting. The impact of icing out right-leaning outlets on a Democrat president in person is unsurprising.
This has nothing to do with the “free press,” but rather the Washington media, which is so haughty that it has Eugene Daniels as its mascot, passing away slowly.
