Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at Wednesday's briefing alongside Gen. Dan Caine, accused the American press of covering U.S. service member deaths in Iran for one reason only: to make the president look bad. The comment landed like a grenade in a briefing room that was already a stage with One America News Network and The Daily Wire called on first, and the BBC only summoned, per CNN's Brian Stelter, because Hegseth apparently liked anchor Tom Batemans tie.
Downing Street's director of communications, Tim Allan, unveiled the plan on Thursday without consulting the group of political journalists known as the lobby who traditionally attend briefings twice a day to question the prime minister's spokesperson. Allan said the government would be reducing the briefings to one a day, and would sometimes replace the single briefing with a press conference. Held at 9 Downing Street, lobby briefings are on the record but not broadcast.
Lauren Tousignant will continue serving as Jezebel's Editor-in-Chief, with former Splinter EIC Jacob Weindling continuing to write every week as Splinter's Editor-at-Large, as we attempt to preserve everything he poured into the site these last two years, as well as the great work that came before. The entire Splinter archive is now available under the Splinter tab of Jezebel.com, from its beginnings as part of Fusion TV to its latest iteration under Weindling's leadership.
Lippmann was one of the most successful people who ever lived.... No other journalist in American history has had so much influence on events, had his hand in so many state papers, been on such equal terms with the great. No other wrote books that became such famous keys to each era in turn, was able to impart to newspaper and magazine columns, with such a magisterial air of cultivation, political intelligence of the coolest and most decisive sort.
After nearly five decades, Dan Balz is retiring from The Washington Post, where he covered 12 elections and eight presidencies as a political correspondent. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg asks Balz about the state of American democracy today, and how he's seen the landscape of politics change. "Over the course of 50 years that I've been doing this, I think that the most important shift," Balz said last night, is that "politics has gotten tougher, coarser, and meaner."
