Sure. Let’s go to court to explain why the correspondent from Playboy is supposed to have a hard pass to the White House anyway.
Playboy reporter Brian Karem on Sunday called the White House’s decision to suspend his press pass “unprofessional,” adding that he had just made “a joke.” “And I’ll never apologize for a joke that got a laugh.”
He is the joke. But nobody’s really laughing.
“I am provocative, and I am a smart-aleck, but I’m not going to apologize for that,” Karem told Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “That’s OK, under the First Amendment. There have been far worse altercations occurred in the Rose Garden and by members of the press in the past.”
This is what the press looks like now. A guy on an infotainment network who talks about himself all the time interviewing a reporter for a porno mag. #Resistance.
Karem told Stelter the White House’s actions reflected an anti-press agenda.
“At the end of the day, this administration, they’re never going to come at you straight on, Brian,” he said. “They’re never going to come at you and say, ‘Hey look, we don’t agree with the First Amendment.’ They’re going to come at you sideways.”
Karem has the same relationship to the First Amendment that dolphins have to modern art.
The best answer is still to turn the White House press room back into the pool and let the media go back to tweeting angrily about Trump’s tweets while warning that if their journalism isn’t funded, democracy will die in Hugh Hefner’s mansion. Or something.
But yes, by all means, let the media decide that the hill to die on is restoring a Playboy correspondent’s inalienable right to have a hard pass so he can stage altercations in the Rose Garden. It’s the First Amendment, according to absolutely no one.
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