respond to matt. i think, a, any good reporter is reporting the facts. and i also think any good reporter or good news organization, when they do get it wrong, issues a correction. if they don t do that, there is absolute room for criticism, and that would be well founded. but the news organizations largely represented here in the white house press corps do just that. if they get something wrong, they correct it. when they don t, then i ll be the first to agree with the president or anyone else who says that they should do that. that is not the same as calling every story or television package or radio package that you don t like fake news. it s just not the same. and so i would push back against that assertion. let me let matt respond to that. go ahead, matt. look, i m not trying to indict every reporter. i have a lot of friends that work for cnn who are on this show right now as well. but what i am trying to say is we all have to acknowledge that the chiron on the screen says t
conferences. i agree with you that an administration that s not as open as the press would like has to suffer the consequence of reporters who are unctious about not getting their questions answered. this is for the white house to determine. april, i love you and respect you. the american people are not staying up at night worried about whether cnn or msnbc or fox can get another question televised. matt, there is a reason why the press was baked into the constitution, why there is a first amendment. it s not about us. it s about the american public. it s about the people to find out what s happening in their house, from the leader of the free world, from the man they elected. it is not about us. we are just the conveyors. we are the first line of the press hold on. i want to get jeff mason back in this conversation. you re the president of the white house correspondents association. you ve met with sean spicer,
in there, and that is just where technology is right now. to think that we re going backwards and not having things on camera to me is just preposterous. can i respond? i think the bipartisan letter from ari a lot of us look at them and sy what are the american people learning? what really is the press learning? jim, i can understand you want as much acsession as you can get. your freedoms are not being denied when the white house determines the method they want to brief the press. that is their first amendment right. they re our cameras and we should be able to turn them on. the white house is saying we can t turn them on. april? matt, with all due respect, when we do not hear the voice of the president, the briefing is needed. and that comes not from the press, but from someone who has authored a book about managing the press, managing the president s message and working with the press. her name is dr. martha joint
here at the white house where the briefings have been not televised or at least not televised as regularly as they used to be. so it s a huge cause of concern for the press and the journalists that my association, our association, represents. and we re working hard every day to push for that to change. matt schlap, you re the president of the american conservative union. a lot of people are wondering, if president obama during his eight years in the white house had tweeted these kinds of attacks on conservative news outlets, a lot of people would have been outraged in the conservative movement. what do you think about the way president trump is dealing with the mainstream news media thus far? president obama wasn t that kind to some of your competitors and kind of froze them out for a period of time. i think what ari fleisher and michael curry said in their letters rings very true to what my point of view is. that is that the white house administration gets to set the rules as to h
administration. that s one reason why we re fighting to that. but also it is in the interest of transparency and the public s at to watch the elected leaders they have put into office. matt, i know you agree, matt, that the news media, that american journalists are not the enemies of the american people, right? well, many of them are some of my closest friends, would have. no, i don t think they re the enemies, but you all have to own something else. look, i m not a journalist. this is going to be easier for me to say. you have to accept that in poll after poll after poll the american people believe major news organizations are biased to the left, and i think you would do the american people a lot of good if you look at not just trump s polls, but your own poll numbers. you re suffering credibility because they feel like you have it against this president and against conservatives. and we should all stop that. part of the reason why those numbers are being driven down is the pres