The ‘fascist takeover’ has begun
Liberal journalists are crying again after the Department of Defense took away their special cubbies at the Pentagon. Last week NBC News, the New York Times, NPR, and Politico were ordered to vacate their dedicated workspaces in an effort to “broaden access … to outlets that have not previously enjoyed the privilege and journalist value of working from physical office space in the Pentagon.”
The libs were especially peeved because most of the outlets replacing them as part of the “annual media rotation program”—the New York Post, Breitbart News, One America News, and HuffPo—are conservative. CNN’s Brian Stelter lamented the “sidelining [of] more popular, more mainstream news organizations” in favor of “relatively small and ardently pro-Trump media outlets.” Media executive Kevin Baron called it a “fascist takeover” by “fake news partisans” and “right-wing purveyors of conspiracy theories.” Katie Couric, the disgraced former colleague of NBC News sexual predator Matt Lauer, urged anxious liberals to “pay attention” because taking cubbies away from journalists was how “news becomes propaganda.”
NBC News was “disappointed” by the decision. Politico was “troubled.” The National Press Club was “deeply concerned.” NPR complained that their Pentagon cubby was an essential part of the taxpayer-funded outlet’s “public interest mission to serve Americans” and urged the Trump administration to use taxpayer dollars to “expand the offices available to press within the building so that all outlets covering the Pentagon receive equal access.”
The Washington Free Beacon was unable to find any prior examples of NPR advocating “equal access” for conservative media. Uri Berliner, a former senior editor at NPR, resigned from the outlet last year after writing an op-ed highlighting its “devastating” liberal bias that represents “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.” CEO Katherine Maher, a left-wing activist who defended looters and rioters in 2020, condemned Berliner for writing “hurtful” words.
Many of Trump’s critics have reacted in ways that falsely imply NPR and others will no longer be able to cover (or even enter) the Pentagon. “This is exactly what a ‘free speech president’ does: Ban the press outlets that are not sufficiently loyal,” wrote Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig. But the outlets have not been banned. Even an angsty op-ed in the Washington Post, co-authored by Baron and former Obama administration spokesman Price Floyd, concedes that “credentialed reporters will retain their ability to cover the Defense Department despite having been ousted from their organizations’ dedicated office space.”
This is still very dangerous, apparently, because now some journalists might not be able to “get on air as fast as possible” to discuss a breaking news story involving the military, which is basically the only reason why anyone who’s not a dementia patient or nursing home resident would ever tune in to NBC News. Some of the poor journalists might have to take their laptops into the bathroom and file their stories while sitting on a big boy potty, which seems like a far more appropriate setting given the quality of their so-called reporting. If they really need a cubby, they can get a job at HuffPo, which doesn’t even have a Pentagon correspondent yet, but has promised to deliver “hard-hitting coverage” of the administration from an anti-Trump perspective.
Please keep these journalists in your thoughts and prayers.
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