President Donald Trump has changed the way White House stenographers have been used for some four decades, no longer having them there to record and transcribe what is being said whenever a reporter is in the same room as the president, according to an opinion piece in The New York Times.
Beck Dorey-Stein, who was a White House stenographer from 2012 to 2017, says that Trump likes to call anyone who disagrees with him “fake news,” but asks that “if he’s really the victim of so much inaccurate reporting, why is he so averse to having the facts recorded and transcribed?”
She answers her own question by saying that “It’s clear that White House stenographers do not serve his administration, but rather his adversary: the truth.”
Dorey-Stein said that previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, had always respected the stenographers, because they "provide a first line of defense against the press by being present whenever a reporter was in the same room as the president…. Should the press actually misquote the president, we were there, armed with an official transcript of what the president did or did not say."
But Trump, upon entering the White House, said he did not want to be recorded, and Dorey-Stein wrote that she saw herself an example of just that, and something that she had never witnessed in the Obama administration.
She related that journalist, Bill O’Reilly was summoned to the Oval Office before an interview with Trump so he could speak with the president privately and without a stenographer, so that there would not be an official transcript of the conversation.
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