Bless their hearts, the poor things
Claim: “We journalists are a lot of things. We are competitive and pushy. We are impatient and sometimes we think we know everything. But we’re also human … We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust. What we are not is the opposition. What we are not is the enemy of people.”
Who said it: Eugene Daniels, self-described “walking Beyoncé encyclopedia,” Kamala Harris superfan, and embattled president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. He co-hosts a weekend show on MSNBC, the failing left-wing network that explicitly markets itself as an instrument of opposition to Donald Trump and his supporters.
Where he said it: The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, sometimes referred to as “nerd prom,” is an extravagant party that our nation’s political journalists throw themselves every year so they can dress up in fancy clothes and pretend to be celebrities or otherwise respected members of society—which they aren’t.
The target audience: Journalists and other mentally unwell partisan Democrats who pretend to be neutral arbiters of truth. Many have grown despondent in the months since Trump took office. “The vibe is more serious,” one White House reporter told Politico before the dinner. “It feels like people are looking for a reason to be together. It sounds cheesy, but folks seem to be holding on a little bit longer in hugs.” Bless their hearts, the poor things.
Context: The dinner also featured some uncharacteristic (for a journalist) remarks from former Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who received the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence. (There are few things journalists enjoy more than giving each other awards for excellence.) Thompson was one of the only mainstream reporters who made any effort to expose the Democratic Party’s efforts to cover up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. He said the scandal should serve as a reminder that “every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” which is something most journalists do not believe. Thompson went on: “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows … We should have done better.”
By the numbers: Nearly 70 percent of Americans said they trusted the media “not very much” or “not at all” when it comes to reporting the news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” according to a Gallup poll released in October 2024.
More context: Thompson was introduced by NBC’s Kristen Welker, who praised his reporting on Biden’s decline and the Democratic cover-up. However, just days before Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June, Welker’s network ran a segment condemning Republicans for promoting deceptively edited “cheap fake” videos that “falsely” portrayed Biden as a doddering geezer.
Analysis: It goes without saying that journalists are often “pushy” and think they “know everything.” But are they also human, as Daniels so boldly claimed? Technically, yes, as far as we can tell. But certainly not in the broader sense. By most scientific standards, the average journalist is both morally and temperamentally aberrant compared to the average member of the human species. We couldn’t find any evidence to support Daniels’s claim that journalists “care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public’s trust.”
Meanwhile, Daniels’s insistence that journalists are not “the opposition” is difficult to assess without further context. The statement is true if referring to the time period between January 20, 2021, and January 19, 2024, or any time a Democrat is president. If Daniels meant to imply that journalists are currently not behaving like an opposition party under President Trump, then of course that is false. Finally, the word “enemy” might be a tad strong, but all the available evidence suggests that journalists neither like nor understand “the people,” broadly defined as normal Americans who don’t trust the media for obvious reasons.
Bottom line: The content of Daniels’s claim are almost irrelevant given the context in which he delivered them—at a celebrity dinner for journalists, wearing a garish white ensemble complete with glittering accessories, as if portraying the cartoonish strongman villain in a dystopian satire, consoling his fellow elites just moments before the unwashed rebel horde storms the palace. As a result, no serious person would consider him a serious or trustworthy source of information.
Verdict: We rate this claim 4 Flaming Clintons.
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