After being lap dogs for eight years, the media is suddenly offended.
The national media’s relationship with White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has taken on a new tension over the last month, as journalists and news commentators have grown more and more personal in their hostility toward the Trump administration’s top spokeswoman.
Several high-profile columnists and writers have torn into Sanders over the last few weeks to mock her appearance, the way she talks, and most recently, an alleged disdain she showed the press by asking them at a briefing this week to say why they are thankful this holiday season.
“Sanders’s sudden shift from press secretary to minister’s daughter a few days before Thanksgiving coincides with her apparent image evolution from a woman unconcerned with vanity to a more polished version,” Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote Tuesday. “One can almost hear the hive of consultants discussing how to imperceptibly adapt this no-frills yeoman to the shallower requirements of a visual medium.”
She added that Sanders was “everything a terrible person… could hope for in a public relations artist.”
During Monday’s briefing at the White House, Sanders began by saying she was “very thankful” for her family, faith, and the people serving in the armed forces.
She then said that reporters who wanted to ask her a question should first state what they’re thankful for, in light of the upcoming holiday. Every reporter called on played along, some more enthusiastically than others, like when the Associated Press White House reporter said he was thankful for “everything.”
But other observers in the media took offense.
The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen called the episode “degrading” and said Sanders was a “bully” who was mocking “democratic institutions, and the English language.”
John Kirby, a CNN national security analyst and former State Department spokesman in the Obama administration, wrote that Sanders’ “little stunt” was “cringe-worthy” and that it “made me embarrassed for the reporters and angry at Sanders and this White House for their arrogance and condescension.”