If you’re not familiar with Brian Karem, executive editor of the Montgomery County Sentinel*, you should be. Because Karem took the kind of courageous stand against the Trump administration’s war on the press that other reporters could take a lesson from.
Karem had a moment yesterday when he got fed up with Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ attacks on the press – at the same time that she promoted an anti-CNN video from sleazebag and verified fake news purveyor James O’Keefe's Project Veritas.
The Washingtonian explains what happened next:
Sarah, come on,” Karem said. “You’re inflaming everybody right here and right now with those words. This administration has done that as well. Why in the name of heavens—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. There’s no option other than that. We’re here to ask you questions, you’re here to provide the answers, 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 else out here is fake media. And everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.”
The rant turned Karem, 56, from a little-known local journalist—who also writes a column for Playboy—with 450 Twitter followers into an internet star with 34,000 followers and a raft of media requests. Instead of asking Sanders his intended question about the Senate’s now-delayed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Karem became the voice of a White House press corps that has felt increasingly antagonized by a prickly administration.
Last night, on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, Karem told the host, “I had had enough.”
Karem said he knows reporters who have been beaten and been jailed trying to get at the facts (and that he’s been jailed as well) “and simply because something doesn’t agree or mesh with their particular mindset, they call it fake media.” Apparently, Huckabee Sanders' promotion of the sting video, which she couldn’t vouch for, followed by her “claiming that [the White House correspondents] have an agenda” was what did it for him.
Karem did not mince words. He accused the Trump administration of “undermining the very First Amendment that you claim that you support.” He also noted that while the Trump administration keeps accusing the media of wrongdoing every time there’s a mistake, even after it’s been acknowledged and corrected, “there’s never any accountability” from the White House. Karem was referring to Trump’s many, many lies.
When Dr. Ben Carson lectured and deliberately embarrassed President Barack Obama during the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast, he was not only endlessly celebrated on Fox News but hired as a contributor.
But since this is a reporter who dared to call out the Dear Leader's administration, Fox News had a duty to smear him. Fox News Insider wrote up a discussion about Karem on today’s Outnumbered:
“What we were watching right there was somebody who wanted to be the clip of the day. He just wanted to be on television. He wanted to be on the network. He wanted to be on the nighttime shows where they parody what was said during the day,” [cohost Melissa] Francis said. “I hope the audience out there knows, plain and simple, that’s all that hissy fit was about.”
Charlie Hurt said Karem was being “obnoxious” and overly sensitive.
“She’s criticizing the press. She has every right to criticize the press,” Hurt said. “It’s just ridiculous.”
In other words, don’t expect any offers to Karem from the network any time soon.
Watch Fox News help the Trump administration wage war on the press below, from the June 28, 2017 Outnumbered.
*Ed Note: Karem is also Playboy Magazine's White House correspondent
Originally published at Newshounds.us
