Republican campaigns have a new trick for dealing with unwanted questions from reporters: Just tweet it all out.
This month has announced 2024 as the year of the media prebuttal, after two top-tier GOP Senate campaigns attempted to spin away uncomfortable stories by publicly claiming to have caught the reporters behind them in an act of partisan sabotage.
Reporters — doing the traditional thing of asking campaigns questions or giving them a chance to respond to reporting before publishing a story — are increasingly finding their emails to campaign staff, and their names and sometimes contact info, screenshotted and posted online like footage from a hidden-camera video. While not a complete innovation, especially in the years after former President Donald Trump normalized calling reporters “the enemy,” the notion that basic reporting is a smoking gun of some kind is moving out of the political fringes and into the mainstream Republican campaign strategy.