A Washington Post columnist said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders humiliates the media on a daily basis.
In a column published Tuesday, opinion writer Kathleen Parker referenced Sanders asking reporters earlier this week to say what they were thankful for before asking a question.
“Yet again, she controlled the crowd, though this time by candy-coating her usual condescension with faux fellowship,” Parker wrote.
“I’m thankful I wasn’t in the room.”
She wrote that her first impulse when someone asks her to share is to “not-share.”
{mosads}”For a press secretary to require professional journalists to essentially beg for their supper, surrendering their adversarial posture like a dog commanded to Drop The Bone, is an infantilizing tactic,” she wrote.
“The effect is to neutralize the opposition.”
Parker wrote one would think reporters were “supposed to be taking dictation” from the interplay between the media and the Trump administration.
She also went after Sanders for evading questions and “scolding.”
To Trump’s base, she wrote, Sanders is “the a la mode on a slice of apple pie, the pom-pom and confetti at a freedom rally, or, perhaps, the elfin princess who can read and direct a person’s thoughts by hypnotizing them with her magic pearls.”
“Her daily humiliation of the press, making them seem like churlish children, is a booster shot of ‘fake news’ animus that also apparently inoculates against viral truths.”
“To the media, she is the wall Trump promised to erect and, increasingly, it seems, we are the swamp he seeks to drain. Out with the media, out with free speech, out with facts!” Parker wrote.
She added that Sanders is “perfectly cast.”
At the end of her column, Parker said she was thankful for the “freedom to speak without (undue) fear of retribution.”