Whereas watching Friday’s White House Day-to-day Briefing on WhiteHouse.gov, my eye used to be drawn to the thumbnail for this weeks’s West Wing Week video, and I believed to myself, in fake-outraged wingnut voice, “Oh, so I assume West Wing Week is ‘very important,’ but demise advantages aren’t, huh? Huh?!?”

As if by means of psychokinesis, mere seconds later, ABC Information Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl made the very same comic story to Press Secretary Jay Carney. He was once joking, right?

“With apologies to Josh, are you able to provide an explanation for to me how it’s that West Wing Week remains to be being produced?” Karl asked. ” I mean, is that really a critical govt carrier that is not shut down as part of the shutdown?”

Carney used to be not as amused as I used to be, replying “I would refer you to the Workplace of Management and Funds in terms of what…”

“They don’t mention the weekly video webcast,” Karl reduce in.

“Name the OMB,” Carney stated. “However the communications place of work clearly is considerably slimmed down, as are so many offices right here, however communications are a part of what we need to do at the White Home.”

If Carney wasn’t precisely amused, at least Fox News’ Ed Henry was once. You’ll discover Ed look over at Josh Earnest and provides a figuring out chuckle as Karl asks the question:

These are issues that Jon Karl indisputably already knew. He referenced the narrator of the West Wing Week movies, Main Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest, in his query, so he knew Josh hadn’t been furloughed, and he used to be sitting in a briefing that was being televised on the White House site, which might require the cooperation of Deputy Director of Digital Content material Adam Garber, who edits West Wing Week. Carney had covered communications staffing right through the shutdown in a briefing the week ahead of, based on another question from Jon Karl. That suggests Karl was once in reality just questioning the price associated with modifying a three-minute Youtube video.

However he wasn’t joking, no longer exactly. White House briefings are part journalism, and part performance artwork, as a result of while truly newsworthy information is hard to return by way of, you could every now and then ask a question simply to make some extent. There’s nothing essentially incorrect with that. When I requested Jay Carney, in August of 2011, how President Obama would handle a debt ceiling risk in his 2d term, I didn’t actually expect Carney to put out a method for me. I mainly wished to make the point that by using negotiating with Republicans on the debt ceiling, the White House used to be inviting future such threats.

Your point, alternatively, will have to be a precious one.

Jon Karl’s point, apparently, used to be to make the White Home’s priorities appear trivial by means of the use of what he knew to be a faulty comparison. The individuals who produce West Wing Week have already been established as performing crucial obligations, which embrace helping Jon Karl. He is aware of that West Wing body of workers has been cut dramatically.

Taken at the side of his unrelenting makes an attempt to balance out the White House’s place of political and moral energy on the shutdown/default, the worthiest conception I will be able to suppose to attach to this is a misguided devotion to neutrality, masquerading as objectivity.