Fox News’ Outnumbered unanimously panned Today News Africa correspondent Simon Ateba over his outburst at Karine Jean-Pierre’s latest White House press briefing.
The Monday briefing featured a visit from the cast of Ted Lasso to discuss mental health, although it went off the rails when Ateba — known for his disruptive interjections — heckled Jean-Pierre to once again accuse her of deliberately ignoring him. Ateba joined Tucker Carlson, later on, to talk about the meltdown he instigated and he claimed that the White House is prejudiced against him.
“The guy that covers the White House, the African guy that covers the White House is looked down upon,” Ateba told Carlson. “I’m Black, I’m African, I don’t have money. They look down on me. I don’t have the opportunities that they have, and they don’t treat me the same way.”
Outnumbered brought up all of this on Tuesday, and former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany started by saying that those who hold the position “deserve respect” from the press pool. She acknowledged Ateba’s frequent outbursts while harkening back to her own clashes with reporters when she was press secretary.
“While he might have a legitimate grievance,” McEnany said, “I don’t agree with his tactic of shouting down the press secretary.”
Harris Faulkner followed up by groaning that the White House press corps stood up for Jean-Pierre, but not for McEnany during her time:
For Simon, I gets his points to a certain degree. He wants to be called on. He’s in the room. But when the press corps is united against you saying you’re showing disrespect, that’s not how you get it done. You know what you get? You get attention, but you don’t get change.
The kind of change that he may get is she answers fewer and fewer questions…But when he soaks up the oxygen in the room and makes it personal — much like his Twitter feed — it keeps the rest of us from doing our jobs. That doesn’t serve the people we’re supposed to serve. I don’t know who he is trying to serve, but it doesn’t serve the American people.
#OneLuckyGuy Guy Benson agreed that Ateba’s conduct will probably make it “even less likely” that Jean-Pierre will answer his questions now. This led the panel to wonder if Ateba thought he had no other recourse to address his claim that the White House is ignoring his policy-based questions.
Kennedy got in by giving a shoutout to Fox Business reporter Eddie Lawrence, who was at the briefing but did not engage in the free-for-all. This was followed by Kennedy’s assessment that “sometimes it’s not racism. Sometimes people are just annoying.”
Watch above via Fox News.
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