President Joe Biden's White House has a lot of answering to do after it was revealed this week that Today News Africa reporter Simon Ateba was booted out of the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA).
Ateba, who is one of the very few in the media who has consistently asked tough and reasonable questions of White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, believes his removal from the prestigious White House press group was retribution over asking the questions that matter, Fox News reports.
The African journalist announced the shocking news during an interview with Tucker Carlson.
"It's a shame and disgrace", says Tucker Carlson when commenting on the fact that Simon Ateba, a top reporter for Africa in Washington, is getting booted from the White House correspondents association.
He used to be one of the few people in the room asking real questions (which… https://t.co/ER61c4ZuY9 pic.twitter.com/FIL10rbQob
— GraphicW (@GraphicW5) March 12, 2023
"They refuse to renew my membership," Ateba told Carlson during the interview. "They are trying to help the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, because when you do the right thing, when you ask the right question, they try to silence you and try to censor you."
"Karine Jean-Pierre, she's totally incompetent, she can't even answer basic questions," Ateba said. "She lies a lot… She's lied repeatedly about the classified documents, even other things… I never believed that this could happen to me in the United States."
Ateba claimed that the removal from the WHCA, which means he can no longer do the job he was assigned by his employer, is nothing more than "punishment" for asking questions that the Biden administration clearly has no interest in answering.
"The only thing they are doing to me right now is trying to punish me for trying to be a real journalist for asking the question that the American people really care about," Ateba said.
"And it's shameful. It's a disgrace, and the president of the White House Correspondents Association, Tamara Keith, who worked for NPR, a publicly funded media organization, should be ashamed of herself."
Because of the fact that most of the legacy media is scared to death to question the Biden administration or anything connected to it, Ateba has received little in the way of support from his fellow journalists and reporters. Nor has he received any support from members of Congress.
In what would be a stark contrast, if President Trump's White House had been even loosely involved in removing a Black reporter from Africa from the WHCA, the media, and Congress, would have gone absolutely bonkers.
Ateba released another statement after his removal from the WHCA describing the side of journalism that nobody in the public sees.
I grant a lot of interviews. They often want me to talk about the heroic part of my job, when I was on a primetime show with millions of people watching, when many lined up @CPAC to take pictures with me.
But I've always wanted to grant an interview on the loneliness, the… https://t.co/1vQ2Fpt6zX pic.twitter.com/iuZcEAVdfZ
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) March 11, 2023
Ateba, being the talented reporter that he is, will undoubtedly land on his feet, and perhaps into better career territory as a result. Any major network or media outlet would be nothing less than lucky to have him on board.