- “Washington journalists are like journalists anywhere else in the world, with this one exception: Washington journalists are bigger assholes. They’re pompous, self-centered, and narcissistic. They attach themselves to a few centralized sources the way suckers attach themselves to superior fish who can survive in the same sort of cold, isolated environments. They are almost universally smart, well-educated, and contemptuous of their fellow countrymen, and they like to be around people who are also smart, well-educated, and contemptuous. . . .It’s an incestuous group. We talk about term limits for Congress because we can see all the bad effects when a congressman has been in Washington thirty years. The same is true of reporters–they get to Washington and you cannot blast them out. They think they’re the center of the world. . . .This is not for attribution, and I mean really not for attribution. I don’t want a single fingerprint on this, no trace, nothing.”
—From a longtime Washington reporter in a story, “Next, Kill All the Journalists,” in the May 1991 Washingtonian.
a blog by Jack Limpert, Editor of The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
FYI President Trump: Washington Journalists Have Behaved This Way For a Long Time
April 4, 2019
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And some are lazy as hell. How many times has TrumpNation author Tim O’Brien been dialed up as an easy quote on all things Trump? All reporters have their go-to sources, but this guy is like one of those constants built into physics equations: If there’s a story in the Post about Trump behavior, expect to see “…,” said Tim O’Brien.