The media isn’t a fan of President Donald Trump’s new press secretary.
Washington Examiner author Paul Bedard took “media big shots” Chris Wallace and Jonah Goldberg to task in a piece published Monday after the Fox News personalities sent a shot across the bow at top White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, who they likened Sunday to a propagandist for Trump and even a “Twitter troll” in a stark warning against her repeated bucking of the media establishment.
“Indefensible and grotesque”
McEnany has won praise from Trump and his base for skillfully battling the press corps and admonishing journalists to do their jobs and investigate the “Obamagate” scandal. But her spirited and combative approach to the role has come with predictable contempt from primadonnas in the journalism industry, pampered by years of facing next to no pushback for spreading falsehoods.
In a panel discussion on his Sunday Fox show, Wallace, a foe of Trump’s, seemed taken aback at McEnany for having scolded journalists to show more curiosity about Michael Flynn’s “unmasking,” which Wallace insisted was nothing “extraordinary.”
“I have to say that if Kayleigh McEnany had told Sam Donaldson and me what questions we should ask, that would not have gone well, Jonah,” Wallace snarked, according to a transcript provided by the Examiner.
Increasingly irrelevant “conservative” commentator Jonah Goldberg, of The Dispatch, later joined in, calling McEnany “indefensible and grotesque” and a “Twitter troll.”
“What Donald Trump wants in a press secretary is a Twitter troll who goes on attack, doesn’t actually care about doing the job they have, and instead wants to impress, really, an audience of one and make another part of official Washington another one of these essentially cable news and Twitter gladiatorial arenas,” he said, according to the Examiner.
Media finds its match
Wallace also said that McEnany was acting like a “spokesperson for the Trump campaign” instead of a public official.
Defending McEnany, Republican communications adviser Josh Holmes pointed out that journalists come to Trump’s press briefings with a “confrontational approach” and a desire to instigate conflict, not get information, and that McEnany is simply pushing back.
“The confrontational nature by which journalists approach the questioning is not really to obtain much information so much as to try to back them into a corner, and I think Kayleigh said, ‘I’m not going to play that game,’ and so yeah, it is completely different from what we’ve seen from years and years of briefings from press secretaries,” Holmes said, as the Examiner reported. “But I think it’s reflective of the nature that we find ourselves in.”
McEnany seems to agree: on Tuesday, she shared a New York Post editorial defending her, titled, “Sorry, media: You’re not victims no matter how much ‘abuse’ you take.”
Judging from all the media hate, she must be doing something right.
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