Videos

Privileged Front Row Of (White) White House Press Corps Berate African Reporter (VIDEO)

Most focus has been on the WHSPOX failure to call on Simon Ateba -- but there's a bigger story

Simon Ateba is the Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa. Month after month he has faithfully shown up to do his job and wait his turn to ask a question of the White House Press Secretary.

But while reporters in the front rows get called on, again and again, to lob softballs at KJP, for Simon, that promised turn has never come. He has reached out with emails to protest, but they are not answered. He has tried calling, but he gets no response.

The only recourse he has left, if he wants to have his voice heard, is to speak up. Which is exactly what he did here. Even in speaking up, he used far more respectful language than anything we saw from Jim Acosta’s unruly mouth in the Trump years.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

(You can hear the other WH journos present telling him to pipe down. In a spectacular display of irony, one particularly shrill voice even cried out ‘decorum’.)

Normally, the left loves a story about somebody with a dark complexion refusing to be told to sit down, shut up, and know their place. There are even slogans like ‘good trouble’. Frankly, that is exactly the point of the clenched fist in activist iconography.

But when an African reporter tries to have his voice heard in the press gallery, he is told, and this is a quote, ‘mind your manners’. Why does this matter?

The main reason this should matter is a question of fairness. He’s a journalist. He’s put in his dues. He came halfway around the world to get here. And he should get his chance to ask a question.

But there’s another reason it matters. Take a good look at the front row of this press pool. In fact, take a look at the entire composition.

For a group of people working in an industry that goes out of its way to run absolutely EVERY story through a prism of race and endlessly inflaming grievances, and mistrust, this group is shockingly monochromatic… the front row, in particular.

The irony is amazing. We have a group of mainly white journos telling an African journalist to learn his place.

If these same people saw ANY other group speaking that way to a black colleague, it would be a front-page headline written in a typeface usually reserved for announcements like ‘War Declared’.

On Monday evening, Ateba appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss what happened in the White House Briefing Room earlier that day.

 

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *