Karoline Leavitt was a massive upgrade over Karine Jean-Pierre as White House press secretary.
But that hasn’t stopped Jean-Pierre from trying to undermine the administration.
And Karine Jean-Pierre went to war with Karoline Leavitt over this Trump ban.
As American Media Watchdog reports:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt instituted two major reforms.
First was banning the Associated Press – an outlet conservatives mock as ‘Associated Propaganda’ – from all Oval Office press conferences and Air Force One.
Leavitt wanted to send a message to the Associated Press for weaponizing language through their stylebook – which other media outlets use – to warp coverage with liberal bias.
One example of this is how the Associated Press won’t use the term “illegal alien.”
Another is how it describes transgender surgeries for children as “gender-affirming care.”
But the breaking point was when the Associated Press refused to acknowledge Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Karine Jean-Pierre bickered with Leavitt in public during an appearance on The View and actually claimed the Associated Press was allowed in the briefing room and given access to the President because it presented unbiased information.
“If you look at the Associated Press, they are the oldest wire in the press briefing room. And you think about journalists, you think about the reason they’re in the press briefing room, you think about the reason they’re in the pool, it’s called a protective pool, there are 13 members of the pool — I’m trying not to get too wonky here — and their job is to provide unbiased information to the American people because the American people deserve that,” Jean-Pierre stated.
That was laughable.
But even more preposterous was Jean-Pierre’s next claims about the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA).
Leavitt stripped the WHCA of the ability to pick the pool of reporters that cover the President’s every spoken word and action.
The WHCA is a leftwing organization whose current President is an MSNBC host.
Leavitt decreed that the days of the leftwing media getting to shape the coverage of the President by funneling it through their ideological allies were over and that every outlet would have the chance to take part of the pool.
Jean-Pierre claimed that was akin to Russia or North Korea.
“And when the White House press team decides to step in and override the White House Correspondents’ Association, who — they have the job of doing that, then what we’re looking at is state TV. What we’re looking at is what Russia is doing. What we’re looking at is what North Korea is doing. And we are doing — they are attacking the fiber of the freedom of the press, they are destroying it because they want to be covered in a friendly way,” Jean-Pierre added.
But what is similar to North Korea and Russia is when media outlets obeyed Jean-Pierre’s marching orders to call videos of Joe Biden’s total senility “cheap fakes.”
Karoline Leavitt allowing news outlets with different voices and perspectives to cover the President is democratizing the press ecosystem.