I have been covering Washington for a very long time, and I have learned that the worst thing a journalist can do is rely on their own eyesight. Just last week, I had a highly productive background lunch with a senior aide who assured me the administration is fully committed to rhetorical dominance over objective reality. So when Zacharia took the dais for her brief debut, I knew exactly what to look for, and it certainly was not the truth.
Zacharia spent a good portion of her time at the lectern praising the president’s vitality and the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity attending his recent events. My colleagues immediately began circulating photographs from the weekend, showing vast swaths of vacant folding chairs in the upper decks of a midwestern arena. This is exactly the kind of pedantic, gotcha journalism that makes middle America hate us. If a press secretary says a room is full, the polite thing to do is agree, not deploy basic arithmetic to humiliate her on her first day.
The outrage only compounded when Zacharia wisely chose to take questions exclusively from a handful of carefully vetted, Trump-friendly outlets. Pundits are calling this a freeze-out. I call it streamlined efficiency. Why on earth would she waste the American people's time calling on a legacy reporter who is just going to ask about the empty seats we all already know are empty?
It takes a tremendous amount of moral courage to look a room full of hostile reporters in the eye and tell them the barren arena they all saw on television was actually standing room only.
I am just asking the questions no one else will: is it really the press secretary’s job to describe the physical world as it currently exists? Or is her job to protect the president’s delicate internal ecosystem from the harsh, unforgiving nature of physical space?
By calling only on correspondents from places like the Liberty Eagle Patriot Network and a gentleman who appeared to be live-streaming from a tactical gear catalog, Zacharia maintained total control of the messaging. The gentleman asked what the president's favorite color of freedom was. This is a valid journalistic inquiry that the legacy media has completely ignored for years.
Zacharia kept returning to the president’s energy, which I can personally confirm is vibrant. A source close to leadership tells me he recently stood up for almost forty-five minutes without complaining about his knees. The media wants to focus on attendance figures, but attendance is a fluid, subjective concept. The seats at the rally might have been devoid of human bodies, but they were absolutely overflowing with potential energy.
When we obsess over whether a human being was actually sitting in a chair, we miss the forest for the trees. The empty seats are a metaphor for the space this administration is creating for all Americans. Pointing out that they are literally empty because people got bored and went home early is simply bad manners.
If you measure a crowd by how many corporeal entities are standing in it, you are playing right into the hands of the coastal elites who demand physical proof of things.
Zacharia’s briefing was notably short, lasting barely fifteen minutes before she abruptly gathered her binder and departed. My peers grumbled about the lack of follow-up questions. But again, they are missing the genius of the maneuver. By leaving before anyone could firmly establish what day of the week it was, Zacharia eliminated the possibility of making a mistake. It was a masterclass in brevity. If you do not stay long enough to hear a dissenting voice, dissent effectively ceases to exist. I plan to adopt this strategy at my next editorial board meeting.
Consider the sheer emotional labor Zacharia is undertaking. It cannot be easy to stand in front of the White House press corps and insist that a rally in a half-empty minor league hockey arena was a cultural watershed moment on par with Woodstock. She is doing the incredibly hard work of curating reality so the president does not have to experience a single, fleeting moment of self-reflection. We should be thanking her for her service.
The mainstream press corps simply refuses to adapt to the modern realities of access journalism. If you want a press secretary to look in your direction, you need to earn that privilege by vigorously nodding along when she says two plus two equals an enthusiastic crowd of seventy thousand people.
We need to move past this archaic obsession with verifiable facts. If Katie Zacharia wants to start her tenure by calling only on people who agree the sky is neon green, we should be analyzing the strategic brilliance of the color choice, not pointing out that it is blue. That is what serious, grown-up columnists do.
The true test of a free press is our willingness to completely ignore our own eyes when asked nicely by someone in a position of authority. I, for one, look forward to tomorrow’s briefing, where I fully expect to not be called on, and I will be deeply honored by the snub.