CNN Brings Sketch Artist To Off-Camera White House Briefing

WASHINGTON, DC — When the White House banned cameras and live audio broadcasts of it's daily press briefing Friday for the third time in a week, CNN decided to provide the next best thing to broadcasting real people: the network sent a sketch artist to the briefing and then aired his drawings.

On their face, the scraggly sketches show only White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer standing behind his podium and portrayals of unidentifiable reporters gathered before him.

The mere existence of the sketches, though, illustrate much more: the Trump administration's exasperation over what it views as unfair coverage and its clash with the media's anger over the diminishing number of on-camera briefings, which makes journalists' reporting more difficult and the White House less accountable.

“We believe strongly that Americans should be able to watch and listen to senior government officials face questions from an independent news media,” the White House Correspondents’ Association president, Jeff Mason of Reuters, wrote in a memo to members on Friday. “We are not satisfied with the current state of play, and we will work hard to change it.”

He had met earlier in the week with Spicer to outline the media's concerns. Nothing changed.

The White House's public reasoning on the bans: the frequency of televised briefings has sometimes drowned out the president's message, Spicer told reporters, off camera.

“There are days where we decide that the president’s voice should be the one who speaks for the administration,” the press secretary said. He later added that off-camera briefings allow for more serious policy discussions and less showboating by reporters.

Not many people buy that reasoning. Sarah Posner wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post that banning cameras is part of a broader White House strategy to neuter the watchdog role of the media by discrediting it. That effort began on the campaign trail with Trump vilifying journalists as "terrible people" spreading "fake news," and has not let up since.

"In this context," Poser wrote, "characterizing the media as 'fake news” then takes on a dual purpose: It helps accomplish that undermining of the media and becomes a justification for doing things (such as canceling briefings) that prevent the press from doing its job."

CNN said the sketch artist was sent to the briefing because the network equated press briefings to arguments before the Supreme Court, where cameras are also banned. So the network sent its in-house Supreme Court sketch artist, Bill Hennessy, to Spicer's camera-banned Friday briefing.

From all indications, the White House has no intention of ending the camera bans or, for that matter, that it has taken seriously the media's concerns. White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has long seemed to relish fights with journalists. In Trump's first month in office he referred to the media as "the opposition party" and said it should "keep its mouth shut."

When a reporter for The Atlantic, Rosie Gray, asked Bannon this week why the briefings are now routinely held off-camera, he replied with a text message.

“Sean got fatter,” he wrote. He did not respond to a follow-up.

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