This should be a legitimate scandal for this White House, as they try to push an eighty-year-old president onto the country for a second term while it appears he cannot answer questions without a cue card. Subramanian should explain who at the White House she’s coordinating with, and her bosses at the LA Times should say something, too. Yet so far, no explanation has been offered. Subramanian herself is refusing to answer inquiries and the LA Times has simply gone silent on the matter. The White House isn’t accountable, either, because they are clearly in cahoots with the people who should be holding them accountable.

If reporters are openly coordinating with this White House to help shape a positive narrative for President Biden — something widely suspected but never as directly proven as it was yesterday — then this is cause for a legitimate crisis of confidence in an industry meant to hold powerful people responsible. During the Trump administration, the public was browbeaten over just such a scenario.

This incident goes beyond Subramanian or this White House and affects every reporter in the briefing room and their colleagues — who appear to retain very little professional respect for what their job is and why they are supposed to be sitting in that chair in the first place. It’s their silence, and their lack of accountability, that suggests this isn’t just a random one-off thing that happened to keep this president focused and preventing him from wandering off again only to be corraled by a staffer in an Easter Bunny costume.