On February 24, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer left representatives from numerous news outlets hungering for flustered gum-chewing, stuttering, and half-hearted justifications for golfing trips as he barred them from his informal press briefing. Among those frustrated reporters left in the pouring D.C. rain was Isaiah Kadiyali ’19, an up-and-coming young writer with great potential who was looking forward to asking Spicer about President Trump’s inability to give a proper handshake.
This missed opportunity had followed a scathing speech by Trump that blasted the media and labeled several sources, including Al-Jazeera and DJ Khaled’s Snapchat story, as “fake news.” However, unbeknownst to the international community, there was one other news outlet that had been labeled such and barred from future press conferences: the IHS Tattler.
Kadiyali is unsure of the specific impetus for this ban, but he has some ideas. “There was one month when the sudoku was literally impossible, and that probably made Mr. Trump very upset. And there was that one time where I wrote an article from a Trump supporter’s perspective and we got a bunch of letters to the editor. That was bad.”
Kadiyali suspects that Trump-Tattler relations will stagnate at best, and worsen at, well, worst. “I don’t even know any Trump supporters,” Kadiyali groaned. “I’m really looking forward to taking Participation in Government, where I’ll be able to meet many people from diverse backgrounds and political views, but right now I don’t even know who to ask to write articles. And we need more news articles.”