The Decorum Files
The White House said ok ok ok he can have his stupid press pass back, jeeeez. But he has to follow our new rules we just wrote down!
CNN dropped its lawsuit against the White House on Monday after officials told the network that they would restore reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials as long as he abides by a series of new rules at presidential news conferences, including asking just one question at a time.
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The White House’s move to restore Acosta’s pass, announced in a letter to the news network, appeared to be a capitulation to CNN in its brief legal fight against the administration…
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Sanders and Shine said they had made a “final determination” that Acosta’s pass would be restored permanently as long as he followed new rules guiding reporters’ conduct at White House news conferences.
In a letter to Acosta, they wrote, “Should you refuse to follow these rules in the future, we will take action” to remove the pass.
Among the rules: Reporters must ask only one question of the president at news conferences, but they can follow up with another if the president consents. A reporter must then “yield the floor,” including giving up a microphone. Failure to abide by these rules, the White House letter said, will result in revocation of a journalist’s White House pass.
Per White House letter to Acosta on Nov. 19, here are the new rules for press conferences at the White House. pic.twitter.com/a6C2pmLv2K
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) November 19, 2018
Any rules about the president and the press secretary not lying? No, of course not.
The president must give consent, anything less is an imposition. But also, the president can grab em by the pussy because he’s famous.
Holms, he didn’t even wait until he was president to grab ’em by the pussy. He was doing that when he was a third rate game show host that thought he was a first rate star.
I recommend Tom Engelhardt’s ‘The Donald and the Fake News Media’ on the TomDispatch blog, which talks very perceptively about the ridiculous game being played by Trump and the media, who, TE rightly says, are wholly complicit in wanting the game…
Wait, I thought Acosta got banned for brutalizing that poor young woman. Why isn’t that covered in the new rules?
This is an idea that crossed my mind before, but these new rules have brought it to the front of my mind again – it would be interesting if the press came up with a strategy that if one reporter asked a question and the president evaded it or didn’t give a straight answer, then the next reporter should just ask the same question again – and the next, and the next. They’d probably never go for it, but it’s nice to think about it happening.
Didn’t… we elderly people conduct a war on tone?
I seem to remember agreeing that tone wasn’t evil, that we could be as disrespectful to established bullshit as we wanted and could still make a point. Hundreds of thousands of keypresses were spent on that point, weren’t they?
Did that all change without anyone waking me up?
Of course, not every hero of the Tone Wars turned out to be a hero. Jerry Coyne and Greta Christina are especially good examples of how it’s OK to question everyone else but very definitely not them.
And they might have told me off personally THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT.
You didn’t fall foul of ‘da roolz’, did you?
Well of course the Coyne-Christina Exception is because they’re right about everything.
I’m starting to see that creep into PZ, as well. To disagree with him is to be an evil bigot, because reasons. Because science. Because because.