The White House is trying really, really hard to 'do more on the record'

(Image credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

published 24 October 2017

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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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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