When Musical Chairs Isn’t A Game

Many good journalists stepped away this week. They’ll be missed for their talent and gravitas. Now the B team needs to rise to the occasion. Are they ready?

And that leads into another issue of the moment: Perhaps the time has come to end White House press briefings. How about we see some real journalism instead?

What I mean by that is this: there are many ways to tell a story and get to sources. No matter which side of the political aisle you favor, it’s easy to see that press briefings resemble less an honest exchange of information and more a piece of American theater. Some days, it’s a comedy; other days, a tragedy.

All the American people want is something to believe in, don’t they? The public shouldn’t regard its search for truth as a full-time job.

The idea of pooling reporters—which is essentially what the press briefings do—has always been met with criticism. Setting politics aside for a moment, pooling war correspondents (also known as “embedding”) is done for safety and for accessibility to certain sources. But it’s the war correspondents who wandered away from the pack or simply struck out on their own who proved to be forces of history: Ernie Pyle in World War II, Michael Herr in Vietnam, and more recently Marie Colvin. Their work didn’t build stories around talking points or echo what others were already reporting.

Modern media needs to be reminded of its roots.

Back to that war zone known as the White House press briefing room, where the tradition of the White House Correspondents’ Association deciding who sits where has been upended to make way for voices that support the current administration along with a new generation of digital creators. In regard to the former, the briefings will be full-on propaganda. Everyone sees that coming. And the latter? The focus will be soft news driven, not investigative, and certainly not the kind of reporting for which Ernie Pyle died during the Battle of Okinawa or for which Marie Colvin first lost an eye and later her life in a shelling attack in Syria.

I’m not sure respectable journalists belong in the briefing room now. Sure, they can push back on party-line narratives, but wouldn’t their time be better spent digging up stories behind the scenes—talking to primary sources, not spokespeople who major in spin?

It’s frontline journalists who need to stand up, not only because they have a duty to the public to report honestly and fairly, because their bosses are caving. The chilling winds of censorship are permeating news outlets everywhere, abandoning values and character—exactly what people want from the news and what distinguishes it from propaganda. Right now, newsrooms should be taking a hard look at how they promote agendas — from who they hire to how they edit — and get back to covering what’s happening, not what they want to happen. Sometimes, bosses need something to believe in, too, in order to know what — and who —to stand up for. Otherwise, they rely on bean counters and lawyers.

We’re in a time of disruption, and Elon Musk is the face of it now. His work with DOGE is all about fast and furious, a hallmark of disruption. But the problem with disruption is that it’s only about what could be done. That’s in direct opposition to American ingenuity, which has always focused on what should be done. If there was ever a time when newsrooms needed American ingenuity, it’s now.

Disruption has given us widespread misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. How’s that working out?

– Jaci Clement, CEO/Executive Director, jaci@fairmediacouncil.org

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