I’ll confess. I have a very selfish reason for being disgusted with Hugh Hewitt for his latest idea. I mean, it’s easy to be disgusted by him on his best day, but his newest stroke of idiocy — banning all non-Fox news outlets from the White House Press Room — hurts me in a very personal way.

See, I love the dynamic between a press secretary and the media. It doesn’t actually even matter which side is in power, I just love seeing the tension in the room when the emissary of whoever is president has to take on journalists from across the country, across the political divide, and across the personality spectrum.

The press is a potent factor in the machinery of America, for better or for worse. But to hear Hugh Hewitt tell it, the press really is the enemy of the people, just like Donald Trump says they are.

On his show, Hewitt was hosting fellow conservative commentator Bethany Mandel, and the two were discussing the Wall Street Journal “exposé” on the White House functioning with a “diminished” Joe Biden. Conveniently omitted from the article about the hoodwinking of America by the media was the fact that the one news outlet they didn’t include on the WSJ hit list was Fox.

The parent company of the Journal is the same as Fox’s — News Corp., owned by Rupert Murdoch. There’s a little hoodwinking for you.

But Hugh’s suggestion just takes the cake for me. Here we have a guy who used to be a standard Reagan Republican: A war hawk, small government conservative. Now Hugh is talking about bending the knee to Donald Trump so much Reagan is spinning in his grave.

HEWITT: Bethany, with the exception of Peter Doocy, I would ban everyone from the White House press room who has been there for the past four years because they are obviously of no use to the country. They didn’t tell us the number one thing, which is that [Biden] is not competent. Why in the world would Trump let them in?

MANDEL: It’s really disturbing and it’s funny because [CNN’s] Brian Stelter and all the columnists decree the trust that we should all have in the media, that we should all respect them and their hard work and sacrifice. Can you imagine any other job in America where you could do your job that badly and still keep on failing up? The media is pretty much it.

HEWITT: That’s because it’s not really failing in the eyes of the mainstream media. They’re not supposed to tell us when Democrats are incompetent. They’re supposed to go along with it because that’s the legacy media. I mean ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Washington Post, New York Times, those five brands are broken beyond broken after this expose. Is there any way you could trust anything that they say?

Imagine a world where Sean Spicer could have simply gone into the Briefing Room, declared that Trump’s 2017 inauguration was the largest ever attended in US history, and no one was there to question a thing.

The problem is, conservative media is becoming the NEW “legacy media,” and there are a lot of them: Newsmax, OAN, RSBN — These outlets all make Fox News look like they actually are fair and balanced. That’s who Hugh Hewitt thinks should be allowed in to ask questions of the president.

And because the media WAS lackadaisical in their coverage of Trump, Hewitt almost has a point about them serving less of a purpose than ever before. But that’s only if they stay on the path they’ve been on.

It is every advantage to conservatives to know how favorable the media has been to Donald Trump, normalizing him and acting like a convicted felon running for president was an everyday thing, and pretend that it’s still a liberal media. Hell, the Washington Post even withheld their quadrennial presidential endorsement because they didn’t want to hurt Donnie’s feelings, and Hugh thinks even THEY have no place in the Briefing Room.

If anything, the Wall Street Journal should be banned for writing an opinion piece and calling it an exposé.

You can watch most of his conversation with Bethany Mandel here. For a Reaganite and a guy who says he studied at the altar of George Will and Charles Krauthammer, Hugh Hewitt sure is pretty mad in this clip:

This sure sounds like totalitarianism to me. At the very least, it flies in the face of the First Amendment, which doesn’t just guarantee you can use racial slurs any time you want. Right there in the middle is the part about the Free Press. pic.twitter.com/3VWYsXtb8e

— Drewbear (@infuzi0n) December 23, 2024