Hi Measle77, thank you for the question. First, for those who haven’t seen it, here’s the interview you’re referring to…
There are some pieces of journalism that you labour over for weeks and months that, for whatever reason, don’t cut through.
Then there are the unplanned moments which capture the zeitgeist and my run-in with Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of those.
I can’t remember another episode in my career which has been so widely talked about. I’ve been asked about it on the street in Washington DC, in a coffee shop in California and it even featured on Jimmy Kimmel!
If you remember, the morning that I spoke to MTG, a story had just broken in the Atlantic magazine about the Signal group chat.
I hadn’t really planned on trying to track down MTG but spotted that she was chairing a committee about trying to pull funding from the broadcasters PBS and NPR (what else) and she is obviously at the heart of the MAGA movement so I thought she might have an interesting contribution.
I waited for two hours outside the committee room so had plenty of time to consider how she might react.
I’m pretty steely and regularly get shut down by politicians who don’t want to speak with me; it happened just the other day when Bernie Sanders refused to answer a question and stonewalled me. But I can’t recall a response as rude as Taylor Greene’s.
I was initially taken aback – you never expect an elected government representative to bark at you to go back to your own country – but I wasn’t upset or deterred. I knew I was asking questions which are valid to our international audience, so I just continued asking them in different ways.
Eventually she walked away from the podium but still hadn’t engaged with me sufficiently so I followed her down the corridor and continued asking questions even as her aide was physically trying to hold me back with his arm pushed against my chest.
I haven’t had any explicit training to deal with that sort of response to legitimate questions but experience of being ignored or even humiliated by public figures means you develop a thick skin.
A few years ago – way before he was in Donald Trump’s cabinet – I had a run-in with RFK Jr, too. It was in the midst of the COVID pandemic and I was asking about him pushing anti-vax theories.
He didn’t like my line of questioning and he started getting agitated and jabbing his finger in my face. Again, I persisted with the questions I, and much of the public, have.
But, yes, after these sort of adversarial moments, I find a couple of glasses of wine helps settle the nerves.
On a wider point, I think it’s quite obvious, even from watching the briefings with press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who often takes swipes at journalists and refuses to answer follow up questions, that this administration has a general disdain for the mainstream media.
While the president regularly talks to the media – actually far more than Biden ever did – the White house is laying the groundwork to potentially slim down the pool (the group of journalists who get regular and close access to the president) and even handpick which journalists are included.
The other week there was a gaggle on Air Force One where the first two questions he was asked were about his golf game.
There are a flurry of executive actions, as well, which have the potential to curtail press freedom and I would say an overall feeling of fear among journalists about how they will be able to hold power to account in the future.