PBS Reporter Complains About Pete Hegseth Not Taking Questions While Being Rushed Out of White House Correspondents’ Dinner

(Screenshot via @ElizLanders on X)

PBS’s Liz Landers raised eyebrows by complaining about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s unwillingness to take questions as he was rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night.

The evening’s festivities were interrupted when a gunman, identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of California, opened fire outside of the Washington Hilton Hotel’s ballroom where President Donald Trump, members of his Cabinet, and much of the D.C. press corps was gathered.

In a tweet fired off shortly after the incident, Landers shared a video of “Hegseth moving through hallway back near the stage of the correspondent’s dinner,” adding that “he did not take questions from the press.” In it, a female reporter’s voice can be heard asking, “Mr. Secretary, is the president going back to the dinner?” as Hegseth is hurriedly ushered toward a door by his security detail.

Other social media users, especially on the right, were critical of Landers’s framing.

“This is a real post from PBS. Journalism is dead. Why is PBS still operating? I thought we DOGE’d them a long time ago?” mused RedState’s Buzz Patterson.

“So this PBS reporter is apparently Jim Acosta’s girlfriend, and her complaining that Hegseth ‘did not take questions’ during an active evacuation after a shooting makes so much more sense,” concurred one of Patterson’s colleagues.

“Jim Acosta’s girlfriend fails what I call The Charlie Kirk Test for the news media…” mused Newsbusters’ Curtis Houck. “When an unpredictable, horrible news event takes place, can you be a normal human being for even a few moments, or is there an instinctual or purposeful decision to be a jerk?”

A proposed community note for Landers’s tweet reads, “This footage shows Defense Secretary Hegseth during a security evacuation at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner after an armed suspect (Cole Tomas Allen) entered the venue with guns and knives, prompting shots fired and officials’ rapid exit.”

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