Shield Spirit

In a terse interview conducted by phone with Politico, the former Georgia congressman, Newt Gingrich said that the president ought to “close down the White House press briefing room” and that reporters “should be banished to a nearby Starbucks.”

Instead of a press briefing, Gingrich said White House spokesman Sean Spicer should field questions from the American people.

“Just say to the American people, ‘you get to choose,'” Gingrich said. He added that the closure would send a message “that the media is a corrupt institution and (Trump) is tired of being harassed by people whose only interest is making him look bad.”

Gingrich also said that the press “are nuts” and that reporters shouldn’t print any information they cannot attach a name to.

The interview was even more terse at the end:

“Gingrich said he was walking home from dinner and had little else to say. ‘Goodbye,’ he said before the phone clicked.”

Tell us how you really feel, Newt.

Gingrich’s remarks echo what he wrote in an op-ed for Fox News earlier this week, when he declared that “the President does not owe anything to the Washington press corps and the left-wing hypocrites who dominate today’s news media.”

“Since Watergate, the news media has acquired a steadily more arrogant attitude and has moved further and further to the left,” Gingrich wrote. “Today, they are adversarial opponents of conservatives — especially the Trump administration.

“I learned the hard way as speaker of the House that I could not regularly meet with reporters on camera,” he recalled. “It set up an arena for gotcha questions. Reporters gained imaginary points for finding stupid, narrow, often irrelevant things to argue over. Instead of being an opportunity for a genuine public dialogue, the daily on-camera briefings became a bloody battleground — totally to my disadvantage. Within a few weeks, we were forced to stop.”

Gingrich’s words were harsh but apt. This is a press corps that has declared since day one that it’s open season on the administration.

Gingrich’s prescription may be a radical one, but something radical needs to be done about the blatant media bias.