The White House really wants to be super transparent with us, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday night, but we just make it so darned difficult.
"That's something that we've tried, I think, to do with some success over the last couple of months, is working more to do on the record, certainly on-camera briefings to allow that sense of access and sense of transparency," Sanders said while speaking at a panel hosted by the White House Correspondents' Association and George Washington University.
"But I think that goes both ways," she continued. "We're constantly having to compete with anonymous sources ... It's a big disservice to the American people that there [isn't] more credible sourcing." Sanders also argued "anybody with a computer can be a journalist," which is true if "journalist" is an expansive word that can mean anything from "writer at a carefully edited, fact-checked publication" to "person who uses Twitter."
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The Trump White House has been labeled the least transparent administration in history by open government watchdogs, a title previously held by the Obama administration. Trump was a vocal critic of then-President Barack Obama's lack of transparency before he took office.
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