What’s the right response when President Trump calls a woman journalist “Piggy”? Or pronounces another woman journalist “a terrible person” who is simply doing her job in front of world media and leaders?
Two leading journalists jumped on the phone Tuesday to share their outrage that Trump did that to Catherine Lucey from Bloomberg News — calling her “Piggy” on Air Force 1 in response to a question about the Epstein files — before attacking ABC News White House correspondent Mary Bruce, who asked whether his family’s business dealings with Saudi Arabia constituted a conflict of interest, in front of the Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman.
Following Friday’s Air Force 1 “Piggy” remark, the president called Bruce “a terrible person” Tuesday after a tongue-lashing about ABC News in which he said the network’s federal broadcast license should be revoked.
“There are no excuses for this,” veteran television journalist Katie Couric told me when I called her about the personal attacks. “It is just devolving more and more every day. No matter what people think of the press, they should not be tolerating this level of bullying and demeaning and insulting language.”
Margaret Sullivan, executive director for the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School and media columnist for The Guardian US, agreed.
“It’s just appalling to see and hear the president of U.S. attacking a woman journalist and calling her a name like ‘Piggy’ and ordering her to be quiet. It’s completely unacceptable,” she said in an interview.
So in an environment of outrage fatigue and the wearing down of norms in political discourse, what is the appropriate response, I asked?
“I don’t know exactly what that should look like,” said Sullivan. “But what it shouldn’t look like [is] everyone standing around, business as usual. Her colleagues and the people around her in the press corps should have stood up for her in the moment … It does need to be called out, and broadly. The news organizations and leadership should certainly be pushing back, hard.”
Couric agreed with Sullivan that there needs to be a formal response, beyond expressions of tweeted support by colleagues such as New York Times correspondent Peter Baker or CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“The White House Press Association and the heads of the news organizations need to have a meeting at the White House to discuss the deteriorating relationship between the White House and the men and women who cover it,” said Couric. “Their silence is deafening.
She added: “It raises the temperature so much, it demonizes journalists even more than they have been by the administration previously.”
So far the White House Press Association has not issued a formal response to the attack on Bruce, which is hardly the first time Trump has attacked a reporter. He frequently insults Collins, who serves as CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent, and recently insulted ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, saying: “You’re a terrible reporter … You know it and so do I.”
But he seems to especially bully female reporters and specifically female reporters of color, such as NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor and April Ryan, who told TheWrap in 2018 that Trump’s attacks on her are part of a pattern of “venom directed at women of color in the newsroom.”
The insult to Bloomberg’s Lucey came in response to a question about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as public pressure mounts on Trump to release the Department of Justice’s files on the sex offender. The House of Representatives voted to release the files on Tuesday.
Bruce used Trump’s meeting with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office not just to ask about his family’s business dealings in the kingdom but also about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
This set Trump off. “People are wise to your hoax,” he said. “Your crappy company is one of the perpetrators.”
“And I’ll tell you something,” he continued, “I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and is so wrong. And we have a great commissioner, a chairman, who should look at that.”
Trump said that it’s not “the question that I mind,” but rather Bruce’s “attitude.”
ABC News declined TheWrap’s request for comment; Bloomberg News did not respond.
Said Couric: “I’ve had people challenging me. Yasser Arafat got sharp with me and said, ‘Who told you that?’ But never have I ever been insulted in the way this president insults journalists on a regular basis simply because they are asking him important questions. That’s their goddam jobs.”
Sullivan said the reporters themselves might have been too shocked in the moment to respond. “That’s a very shocking thing to have happen,” she said. “She might not have had the resources in the moment.”
Couric said she would have pushed back in the Air Force 1 incident: “’Excuse me sir? What did you just call me?’”
