If Sarah Huckabee Sanders won't host press briefings, why is she still getting paid?

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has hosted just one press briefing in the past 81 days, obliterating all records for media non-compliance. This accelerated strategy to choke off press briefings is part of a historic, incremental effort by the Trump administration to lock out the press—and, by extension, the public—from the government’s official duties and business.

And it's working. The press briefings have been effectively buried, which raises an interesting question: If Sanders won't do her job of briefing the press, why is she still pulling down a six-figure salary paid for by taxpayers?

Sanders was promoted from a deputy to White House press secretary in 2017 and pocketed a $14,000 raise in the process. She now earns $179,000 a year, which ranks among the highest salaries that White House advisers are allowed to make.

Sanders' no-show routine at the press briefings has become so absurd that White House reporters now dash out onto the grounds when they find out she's giving a live interview to Fox News on the White House lawn. That's one of the few ways they are able to ask Sanders questions on-camera: When she's done with her Fox News interviews, reporters pepper her with questions on her way back into the White House.

And even when she was hosting semi-regular briefings, Sanders was part of a team that did as little as possible to help reporters. "When [Sean] Spicer and Sanders do take questions from journalists, they increasingly offer nonanswers,” the Washington Post reported … in 2017. The nonanswers remain a trademark. It's just that the briefings themselves have effectively vanished.

That's in part because Trump clearly functions as his own press secretary. He now routinely takes more questions from the press—during White House "pool sprays" or while walking to the helicopter on the South Lawn—than does Sanders. Trump fancies himself as a top-rate media communicator and obviously thinks he should handle the duties of addressing the media.

He's also specifically signaled that he doesn't want his press secretary answering questions from the press. "The reason Sarah Sanders does not go to the ‘podium’ much anymore is that the press covers her so rudely & inaccurately, in particular certain members of the press," he tweeted in January. "I told her not to bother, the word gets out anyway! Most will never cover us fairly & hence, the term, Fake News!”

That leaves Sanders to do what, exactly, in a White House that has pulled the plug on daily press briefings?

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2EMI1HO