The Hill Media Reporter Calls For Limiting WH Briefings to Stop Media ‘Grandstanding’: They Should Get Mondays

Aidan McLaughlinJun 14th, 2018, 10:06 pm

Joining a long history of journalists defending the U.S. government against questioning by a free press, The Hill media reporter Joe Concha reacted to the wild White House press briefing on Thursday by calling for a crackdown.

The relationship between the current administration and the press is perhaps the most contentious in modern history. The media says that’s because of the endless lying, Trump’s tendency for Stalinist anti-media rhetoric, and general antagonism. The administration’s defenders, like Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs, say it’s all because the media simply hates Trump and want to bring him down.

Enter Concha, appearing on Dobbs’s show Thursday night, following a raucous briefing in which Playboy White House correspondent Brian Karem berated Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for declining to answer questions on the administration’s immigration policies.

Dobbs’s solution to the unruly briefing was apparently to have the White House assign someone to “slap the hell out of” disrespectful reporters.

Concha (a former Mediaite columnist) was more measured, suggesting that instead of hiring some sort of bailiff to slap around journos, we limit media access to the administration.

Concha first echoed arguments from Clinton and Bush press secs Mike McCurry and Ari Fleischer, “[who] said we need to take live TV cameras out of these press briefings because obviously these people are doing this to go viral and they want the attention. And they play into President Trump’s argument by the way that this is not only a negative press but a hostile press as well.”

“And then I would even go one step further,” Concha continued. “I would say the White House press corps only gets one day, they get Mondays. You put business reporters in there on Tuesday, so we have more questions about the economy, jobs, things that people care about. Wednesdays go to the foreign press, and that’s it.”

“That would get us a lot more answers and information than the grandstanding we’re seeing,” Concha added.

Concha was appearing on Fox Business Network alongside Candace Owens, an InfoWars personality and comms director for an organization that keeps accidentally hiring racists, who joined in on slamming the press for its behavior.

Concha expanded on his proposal in comments to Mediaite:

“Instead of limiting press freedom, allowing other reporters from other media segments in addition to the White House press corps only expands the amount the press asking questions while widening the range of the questions themselves being asked from a topics perspective,” he said. “To amend the idea, which has been presented before, rotate back in one of the two — regular press corps and business reporters — on Fridays.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

[image via screengrab]