The Donald Trump administration is in all-out war with the media. That’s no secret. But over the weekend, the White House ramped up its feud with reporters calling out the seemingly endless diet of alternative facts to a shocking new level. It actually went as far as to smear a reporter by planting a bogus story.
You may recall that White House press secretary and communications chief Sean Spicer confiscated a number of staffers’ phones to check for leaks. Politico broke that story on Sunday afternoon. Within hours, the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner reported that Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt, who co-wrote the story about the leak check, had committed a shocking breach of protocol and basic decency. He supposedly laughed at the death of Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the botched Yemen raid.
Isenstadt had gotten a tip that Spicer brought his deputy, Jessica Ditto, to tears when he dressed her down for some of her work. When Isenstadt called Spicer about the anecdote, Spicer denied it, saying that Ditto had only gotten emotional once–“when we had to relay the information on the death of Chief Ryan Owens.” The Examiner, quoting anonymous White House officials, reported that at that point, Isenstadt’s tone became “dismissive,” and he started “laughing about that SEAL.”
Simply put, the Examiner’s story reeks. Not only is it terribly disjointed, but it relies on the very anonymous sources that Trump assailed at CPAC. Erik Wemple, the longtime media critic at The Washington Post, saw something else. He believes that by headlining the story as a claim, the Examiner wasn’t putting any “institutional credibility” in the story. Instead, it was announcing with capital letters that it was “carrying the water for a media-hating White House.”
When Politico editor Carrie Budoff Brown saw this, she hit the ceiling.
Reporter writes story WH doesn't like/disputes. WH anonymously plants false story about reporter. https://t.co/2ZGue3uxfz
— Carrie Budoff Brown (@cbudoffbrown) February 27, 2017
Later on Tuesday, Wemple learned more details about the lengths to which Spicer went to smear Isenstadt. Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring recalled that while Isenstadt was still on the phone with Spicer, Spicer claimed Isenstadt had laughed at Owens–and hinted that he would tattle to another outlet about it. Isenstadt adamantly denied laughing at Owens. According to Dayspring, Isenstadt was merely surprised at how Spicer lost his cool when he denied reducing Ditto to tears.
On Sunday, soon after Politico went live with its coverage of the leak check, Spicer emailed Isenstadt and once again accused him of laughing at Owens. He also warned Isenstadt that he would “be sure to get that out”–i. e., the laughter claim. Soon afterward, Examiner reporter Paul Bedard, who wrote the Examiner’s hit piece, emailed Isenstadt to tell him White House “insiders” had given him a “nugget.”
By planting this story, Spicer behaved in a manner that would have done Richard Nixon proud. Indeed, when this story rolled across my Facebook feed, I immediately thought back to Nixon’s Plumbers. This sounds like the very kind of dirty trick they would have tried had social media existed in the 1970s.
It is literally impossible to understate just how outrageous Spicer’s behavior was here. Not only is this story borderline libel, but it’s incredibly dangerous. After all, Spicer was almost certainly aware of how pro-Trump Twitter goons attacked and threatened journalists who wrote anything even remotely critical of Trump during the campaign. Thankfully, this story was exposed as bogus before anything happened. But if Isenstadt had been the target of harassment and trolling as a result, Spicer would have been held responsible.
The Examiner’s behavior is equally appalling. Despite the numerous red flags surrounding this story, it is still live as I write this on Tuesday night. Indeed, no one has even appended an editor’s note. Stories have been retracted for far less than this.
In a normal White House, a staffer who acted this way would have been forced to personally apologize to the targeted reporter–at the same time that he was resigning. And that would be true regardless of whether we were dealing with a halfway normal Democratic or Republican administration. But then again, we’re talking about a White House that has no problem with staffers calling private citizens to shake them down at night.
If Spicer has anything at all in him, he will apologize for this disgraceful stunt and resign. Additionally, the Examiner must retract this story immediately. It’s still available on the Examiner’s Twitter feed, so maybe we should let them know what we think about attempts to peddle fake news generated from the West Wing.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
