New Delhi: In an incident exposing the doublespeak of White House, the US President’s office called out alleged harassment of WSJ reporter by BJP supporters while chose to gloss over an incident where a seasoned reporter was shut down by its own press secretary for asking questions.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Simon Ateba, a senior correspondent of Today News Africa had a verbal showdown during the press briefing on Monday. Perturbed over repeated questions, the US official directed him to ‘stop asking questions’ and if he didn’t fall in line, the presser would be called off.
The incident, which could have otherwise garnered global headlines was tactfully brushed under the carpet. And, White House, the biggest proponent of free speech chose to maintain silence over it. Not just, it refrained from condemning the incident but chose to ‘cut out’ that portion of heated exchange between the scribe & US official. It’s when the news outlets like Fox News reached out to White House for clarification on the issue, the latter restored that particular portion of the incident in its digital streaming. Also, technical glitch was the lame excuse given for missing the heated part of presser.
The embarrassing incident has raised questions on the ‘doublespeak’ of White House and questions are being asked over its strong objection to online trolling of WSJ reporter who faced online criticism for questioning Prime Minister Narendra Modi about ‘India being a democracy and oppression of minorities in the country’ while staying mum on silencing the press freedom in its own backyard.
Sabrina Siddiqui who posed the questions to PM Modi on minorities situation in India had claimed that she was being harassed by right-wing trolls because of her Muslim identity. Following this, the White House denounced her harassment and said that it was ‘unacceptable & antithetical to democracy.’
What happened in ‘truncated’ clip
In that missing portion, scribe Simon Ateba was accusing the Biden administration of discriminating against him and not giving him a chance to ask questions.
Karine Jean-Pierre, though asserted that White House was committed to freedom of press but this couldn’t prevent it from turning into embarrassing situation.
The reporter also took to Twitter and claimed that the White House tried to pull off fraud by ‘editing out’ the embarrassing portion from press briefing but were caught.
Outrage after the @WhiteHouse removed my interaction with White House @PressSec Karine Jean-Pierre during our press briefing yesterday, Monday. What they did was..they pretended that the feed had a problem on YouTube when we were live, then continued broadcasting after our… pic.twitter.com/f5Hwcxrkun
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) June 28, 2023
