The briefing for the previous eight years has been a love-fest.
President Donald Trump suggested Friday morning that he might cancel the daily White House briefing.
That’s not a bad idea.
“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Trump tweeted. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”
Putting aside the president’s claim his spokespersons are untrustworthy, ignoring his odd use of quotation marks around “press briefing” and ignoring his ridiculous reasoning (the White House’s written statement on why he fired former FBI Director James B. Comey was just as confusing as his press secretaries’ spoken defenses), nixing the daily briefing might actually be good.
The White House shouldn’t cancel it, of course, as it’s never good for the powerful to limit press access. Rather, journalists should take the lead on this and just stop going to the daily pressers.
Put simply, the White House press briefing is worthless. It is an exercise in futility, where a lot of noise is made in return for little actual news.[…]
President Donald Trump suggested Friday morning that he might cancel the daily White House briefing.