It had to be said even if it was true

When you go to a rodeo and  are downwind of a bullpen, you catch a certain fragrance and can get a pretty good idea of what is causing that odor. And when you’re standing in a garden and someone is directly shoveling manure at your feet there is no doubt what it is that you are smelling.

The same can be said for journalists and some of the press conferences they attend.

Earlier in the week White House reporter Brian Karem had seemingly had enough of the maligning tossed his brethren’s way by the current president of the United States and his administration when he interrupted and chided White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders after she called into question the accuracy and professionalism of journalists covering the president and stories related to him. This was after months of POTUS, his allies and his communications staff referring to coverage they found unfavorable as “fake news,” and portraying journalists as “enemy of the people.”

“You’re inflaming everybody right here, right now, with those words… Any one of us, right, are replaceable, and any one of us, if we don’t get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us. You have been elected to serve for four years at least,” Karem said.

“And what you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say, ‘See, once again, the president is right and everybody out here is fake media.’ And everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.”
To some, Karem’s remarks were inappropriate and unprofessional. To others they were a long time coming, if a little out of line with accepted protocol.

For anyone who sees journalism and interviews as conversations with people, where the back and forth is noted and used as a means to tell a story, Karem’s response was honest. Maybe even a relief and cathartic.

There is nothing profoundly unique about being a reporter. They have bosses and peers and colleagues and professional acquaintances like everyone else. And, like everyone else, they are subject to having to endure piles of manure heaped their way, whether out of social niceties or professional decorum.

But for every reporter who has ever had to listen and nod as a politician’s spokesperson tried to spin the angle of  story into something more flattering and less truthful, for every journalist who has to absorb a politician’s on the record remarks and compare them to the off-the-record, foul-mouthed derisive explanation for a vote or an action, for every person who reports for a living and is professionally restrained from calling B.S. in the face of a lie regarding political appointments, bigoted comments, unmet campaign promises or legal threats — when any other person might succumb to that pleasure — Karem’s moment of honesty was anything but fake. It was a welcome moment of relief.