Who needs a press secretary?
What’s more important: President Trump’s rash hiring and firing of a White House press secretary, or his never-ending campaign to replace the press with his own unreality?
I’d say the latter. No matter who the press secretary is, or whether there even is one, the president will continue to set his own strategy. Although he’ll always covet cameras and microphones, he will demonize reporters, keep them out when he can, and try to replace them with propagandists.
We’re seeing it this weekend: CNN has been excluded from traveling on Air Force One again, disrupting pooled TV coverage of the president’s trips.
This is why some of the press freedom advocates who cheered Judge Timothy Kelly’s ruling against Trump’s White House media ban on Tuesday also quickly pivoted to the broader issues at stake.
“We welcome Judge Kelly’s order,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, “but we are concerned that the White House continues to ban some news outlets from the White House press pool,” and is “still threatening to ban other journalists from the White House because he disagrees with their reporting. That practice is unconstitutional.”
“Trump’s relentless assaults on the press won’t cease — making it all the more crucial to protect journalists’ right to hold the administration accountable,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press.
Long after the shock of Katie Zacharia’s hiring and firing wears off, Trump’s pressure campaign against the press will still be going.
What a spokesperson says matters, but what the president says matters most. Just yesterday, Trump said at a rally that “we” have removed “transgender mutilation insanity out of our schools,” but “we have five states where your child goes off to school as Tim and comes back as Tammy three or four days later.”
“It’s true,” he insisted, as he imagined a parent finding out that “your son is in the hospital” without any notice at all.
How’s a spokesperson supposed to respond to specific questions about that?
Katie Zacharia’s stilted press briefing and similarly awkward Fox News interviews led to her removal as press secretary, with multiple advisers describing her as “woefully underprepared” and lacking “basic skills to do the job,” per CNN’s reconstruction of events.
“Though Trump did not initially think her performance at her first press briefing was particularly bad, he later became embarrassed by the coverage,” Kristen Holmes, Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak wrote here.
Her Sean Hannity appearance apparently cemented the decision. Trump confirmed that he watched both interviews, and called them “tough.”
“You’ve gotta wonder” if Zacharia went into those Fox interviews “thinking that they might’ve been a bit of an effort to rehab her, but instead it read a bit more like a sneak attack,” Brianna Keilar said during our breaking news coverage on CNN.
The Fox hosts did seem skeptical of Zacharia, though the questions weren’t especially hard. Politico is out with a story suggesting that the Hannity segment was a set-up, though Trump adviser Jason Miller is calling that a “completely absurd lie.”
Zacharia still thought she had plenty of runway as of midday Friday, when she sat down with Wall Street Journal reporters to talk about “her plans for the role.” Miller knocked on the door, said VP JD Vance wanted to chat, “Zacharia left the room,” and “never returned — to the interview, or the job.” Here’s a gift link to that article.
IMHO, this story isn’t really about Zacharia at all, it’s about the president and his hiring practices. As CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote this morning, “In one fell swoop over the course of a week, the White House confirmed how rudderless, impulsive and hubristic its entire operation is.”
“Before hiring Zacharia, Trump wanted to hire former Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, two administration sources said, but she signaled she was not going to take the job,” Marc Caputo reported for Axios.
One of the sources told him “she’s no longer on air but she’s still on the Fox payroll and the taxpayers can’t compete with that.”
Trump remarked to Fox’s Peter Doocy yesterday that he’s getting lots of phone calls about the open press secretary spot because “everybody who takes it becomes a star.”
Let’s see how long the job remains open for.
That’s what National Review’s Jim Geraghty did in this tweet, tying together three of the week’s biggest Trump-driven stories: “Sudden quick reversal on Kimberly Guilfoyle, sudden quick reversal on livestreaming the Nidal Hasan execution, sudden quick reversal on Katie Zacharia as press secretary… and we have a bit more than two years left in this administration.”
My DVR is set for this: “MAGA Ever After?” is premiering tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on CNN as part of “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.”
Donie O’Sullivan spoke with Ashley St. Clair, James Fishback, Laura Loomer and a range of ordinary voters for his latest hour-long report. “In it, we take a look at the issues causing major divisions in MAGA right now, from the Iran war to the building of A.I. data centers,” he told me. “We meet the people who have broken from Trump, those who remain as loyal to him as ever, and we ask ahead of the midterms and the 2028 campaign: What might a post-Trump future look like for the Republican Party?”
One of Donie’s interviewees, Trisha Hope, was a Trump die-hard and a member of the so-called “Front Row Joes,” a group that travels across the country for the president’s rallies.
“Over the last year, Trisha has broken with the president on his handling of the Epstein files,” he said. “Trisha says the distrust of Trump due to his handling of the Epstein files has upended her life, it has lost her friends, and it has her questioning just about everything else the president has said and what he stands for.”
Donie adds: “Incredibly, Trisha told me she still believes the 2020 election was stolen. She said she is open to the idea that she could be wrong but still cannot shake that false belief in the Big Lie. It’s a remarkable reminder about just how sticky conspiracy theories can be.”
🔌: Here’s a six-minute clip from the documentary featuring Trisha…
“As Americans express frustration with the country’s economic outlook, Vice President JD Vance told CBS News this week it could take some time to see improvement,” Joe Walsh writes, previewing the VP’s town hall with Michiganders that will air tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern. Tony Dokoupil moderated the event. One of the other notable headlines from it so far: “Vance says ‘selling access to the White House’ is ‘disgusting and despicable.’”
The Bulwark’s Will Sommer offers another glimpse inside the MAGA media pipeline, where Trump officials supply smears and friendly influencers send them flying with little scrutiny.
In this case, former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski fed Laura Loomer a phony story that the fired FEMA finance chief Mary Comans had illegally funded luxury hotels for migrants, “with the expectation that she would further disseminate it to her on-line followers,” a federal judge found. A DHS spokesperson similarly fed Benny Johnson the smear, knowing it was false, the judge found.
Both influencers obliged, doing “virtually nothing to verify what they were given,” Sommer writes. The judge cleared Comans’ name, finding she had “neither the authority nor the ability to direct money to or away from a particular grant recipient…”
The Wesleyan Media Project identified more than 220 midterm ads “that used A.I.-generated fakery in ways large and small this midterm season,” the NYT’s Stuart Thompson reports. Researchers found that candidates and PACs, “mostly tied to Republicans, have rushed to adopt the technology, spending more than $137 million to promote such ads this year,” Thompson writes. Here’s a gift link to that story, where you can see those AI ads for yourself.
>> Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Stephanie Baker and Priyanjana Bengani report that “Russian disinformation operators are deploying an army of bots to inflate view counts of fictitious posts about celebrities and Democratic candidates ahead of the US midterm elections.” (Bloomberg)
New York Times assistant managing editor for standards and trust Patrick Healy has launched a new weekly newsletter called “The Backstory.” If you like what we do here at Reliable Sources, I think you’re going to value what Healy is doing.
Healy says the new letter “about Times journalism” will be a “running conversation about the news and our judgment calls on how to cover it.” Check it out here…
>> New today: “TikTok has banned the entire ‘Musk’ film account, citing political content that violates its policies,” Steven Zeitchik reports. (THR)
>> “Going forward, all advertising on X will be subject to a reasonable esthetic standard,” Elon Musk tweeted yesterday. “Advertisers who post ads that are ugly, shrill, strident or overstate claims about their product will be barred from advertising.” (X)
>> Following up on an item we included yesterday: “After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI.” (The Verge)
>> Danny Funt interviews longtime ESPN producer Nicole Noren about why she resigned from the network in protest of its embrace of gambling. (CJR)
>> Anna Merlan asserts that “Elon Musk is the midterms’ biggest disinformation risk.” (Mother Jones)
>> Maxwell Adler wonders who might sit on the CNN and CBS News editorial independence board. (Vanity Fair)
>> Corbin Bolies talks with Steven Soderbergh, Jeffrey Katzenberg and other Hollywood figures about their embrace of AI despite fears about jobs, creativity and audience backlash. (Variety)
>> Sophie Levenson says “college journalism is thriving at schools that don’t teach it.” (Poynter)
I’m on the way to see “You Can See Everything,” which is getting an astonishing amount of critical acclaim. On Rotten Tomatoes, the documentary has a 99% fresh score. “Critics can’t believe what they’re seeing,” Vulture says.
Out here in New Jersey, it was hard for me to find two good seats together for a dinnertime showing! If you get to check it out this weekend, lemme know what you thought…
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.