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Psaki snarks at reporter for calling out lack of access to public Biden event: If we’re trying to keep it secret ‘we’re doing a bad job’

February 4, 2022 | | Print Article

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A Time magazine reporter scuffled with White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Twitter this Thursday over the White House’s lack of transparency, prompting a “white knight” to rush to Psaki’s defense as if he was her press secretary.

The reporter, Molly Ball, took issue with the nontransparent, incestuous way in which the White House had arranged an ostensibly “public” event featuring both President Joe Biden and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

“Biden is doing a ‘public’ event with the mayor here in NYC, but it is open only to the pool and an invitation-only press list. Mayor’s office says they had no say in who was invited,” Ball tweeted Thursday afternoon.

“Apparently Joe Biden wants to be seen with Eric Adams so badly that the White House is…not letting the national media cover it!”

She added that the White House “just handpicked pre selected media outlets” to attend the event instead of going through the usual “credentialing” process.

Look:

The White House press secretly personally responded to the tweets a couple of minutes later with her notorious snark.

“The event is live on television with a full press pool selected by the rotation run by the White House Correspondents Association. If we are trying to keep it a secret we are doing a bad job,” she wrote.

Ball immediately pushed back, tweeting, “As I said, there was no ability for national media outside the pool to cover this event.”

But instead of replying, this time Psaki let Tommy Christopher take care of Ball for her.

Look:

Christopher is a Mediaite correspondent who’s been accused of being blatantly biased to the left. In fact, just three years ago, conservative radio show host Mark Levin called him a “leftwing crackpot.”

In his response to Ball, Christopher accused her of being “misleading.”

“This is hella misleading, the travel pool is covering it, like they always do. No travel events are ‘open press,’ it would be chaos. And [the White House Correspondents’ Association] picks the pool, not the White House. AND it’s on TV [right now],” he wrote.

Ball responded by arguing that there should have still “been a credentialing process for national press, even if there was a capacity limit,” but Christopher promptly fired back, this time outright accusing her of “lying.”

“But you said the @WhiteHouse ‘hand-picked’ the reporters, that’s false. And credentialing outside of the travel pool is rare, you must know that, stop misleading people. You can advocate for more access without lying about it,” he wrote.

The back-and-forth exchange then came to an abrupt end.

View the final tweets in the exchange below:

It’s not clear who’s right in this particular scenario. What’s known for certain is that the Biden White House has previously been caught hand-picking reporters.

“In recent months, the White House press office has cherry-picked reporters allowed into Biden events in the nearly 3,000-square-foot East Room and even on the lawn by citing dubious ‘spacing constraints,'” the New York Post reported last October.

The Post further noted that when pressed about this discrepancy, the White House kept offering “inconsistent explanations” that really made no sense.

“White House staff have given inconsistent explanations to reporters about the process behind choosing who get to attend the forums, where Biden sometimes takes questions. Some journalists have been told that it’s first come, first served, but that’s been anecdotally debunked when reporters who RSVP just before the cutoff time get in but those who RSVP quickly do not,” according to the Post.

“Other explanations offered by the press office to reporters include that there’s a mysterious rotation among major news outlets, or that decisions are made based on the size of a publication’s audience — a claim belied by The Post’s access to just a single event in four months. Random choice also is an explanation that’s been floated.”

The report’s author, Steven Nelson, tried at the time to confront Psaki about it, but she fired back with a non-answer answer and then quickly dismissed him:

Months later, something similar appears to be occurring again. Except that this time, it appears Christopher’s “on the job” …

Vivek Saxena
Latest posts by Vivek Saxena (see all)

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