When White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders asked the press corps Monday to preface their daily briefing questions with a statement of thankfulness, reporters obliged.
Or, should we say, obeyed.
For this, no doubt, Sanders was grateful.
Yet again, she controlled the crowd, though this time by candy-coating her usual condescension with faux fellowship.
I’m thankful I wasn’t in the room.
My first impulse when someone asks me to share is to not-share. This isn’t because I’m not a sharing person — you can have my cake and eat it, too — but because sharing, like charity, should be voluntary. 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. The effect is to neutralize the opposition.
Yes, I said opposition. The press, by definition, is oppositional. As Mr. Dooley, the turn-of-the-century fictional bartender created by columnist Finley Peter Dunne is often paraphrased: “The newspaper’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”