So This Just Happened

MUST WATCH: White House reporter @BrianKarem pushing back against Sarah Huckabee Sanders and saying what many people have been thinking. pic.twitter.com/hW49e0tdWY

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) June 27, 2017

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: —people in this room, but news outlets get to go on, day after day, and cite unnamed sources, use stories without sources, have, you know—you mentioned the Scaramucci story where they had to have reporters resign— [crosstalk]

BRIAN KAREM: Come on. You're inflaming everybody right here and right now with those words. This administration has done that, as well. Why in the name of heavens— Any one of us [gestures to reporters in room] are replaceable, and any one of us, if we don't get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us.

HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think—

KAREM: You have been elected to serve for four years, at least. There's no option other that that.

HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think—

KAREM: We're here to ask you questions; you're here to provide the answers! And what you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say, "See? Once again, the president is right and everybody else out here is fake media." And everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.

HUCKABEE SANDERS: I disagree completely. First of all, I think if anything has been inflamed, it's the dishonesty that often takes place by the news media. And I think it is outrageous for you to accuse me of inflaming a story when I was simply trying to respond to his question.

To recap: White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders babbles some Trump-standard nonsense about "fake news." Reporter Brian Karem quite rightly calls out what she's doing as irresponsible and notes that she's demonizing the members of the White House press corps who are just trying to do their jobs. To which she responds: "I disagree completely." And then demonizes the press again.

Listen, I'm not always thrilled with the way the White House press corps and the broader political media does their jobs. But they are doing important work, exactly as Karem describes: Asking questions of the elected officials who owe We the People answers to those questions.

The Trump administration's war on the press is a refusal to be accountable to voters. (No information, no recourse.) This, too, is what happens in authoritarian regimes. #Resist.