Peter Fimrite

Ran across this at Stinson Beach. Comey really gets around!

Getting away from all the Comey talk:

‘The media has objectively lied about him over the years.’ ‘With all due respect, we cannot say “the media”’ Ben Leo and Mark Albert debate the media’s role and whether journalists lied during Covid, the Russia collusion hoax, and about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

How dare @adammocklerr point his finger in @ScottJenningsKY face! Oh wait this is Scott Jennings pointing his finger in @MichaelEDyson’s face. My bad. 😐

@SinatraGeoffrey @SargeDaBarge @AetiusRF He didn’t stoke shit. Trump’s MAGA and the racists within it stoked the hatred and division.

What are you talking about? Whites overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Twice. Because they believed it would finally heal the racial division of the past. And then all he did was Stoke racial division because that's what socialism needs. Suddenly after 8 years of this guy nobody was trusting each other. Everybody saw racism and sexism and every ism all over the place. So they voted in Trump. Because they realized that they were tired of being manipulated by the same lying politicians. So now we've got this guy. Come to find out he also is owned by the same people all of our politicians have been so let's not freak out because he acts like a goofball sometimes.

His presidency started an era of decline, ugliness, and insanity that embedded itself in American culture

@Kirbnation @CurtisHouck @kaitlancollins There’s nothing partisan about common sense and honesty, soyboy.

@pfimrite @CurtisHouck @kaitlancollins Pete the Libtard chiming in.

CNN’s @KaitlanCollins: “You were talking about how busy you were this morning. James Comey was in court. He self surrendered. He’s now been charged a second time, this time over a social media post with seashells that said 8647. Do you really think that he was endangering your life or threatening your life with that post?” President Trump: “Well, if anybody knows anything about crime, they know — 86. You know what that’s a mob term for? Kill him, you know. Do you ever see the movies? 86 him. The mobster says to one of his wonderful associates, 86 him. That means kill him. It’s I think of it as a mob term. I don’t know if people think of it as something having to do with disappearing, but the mob uses that term to say, when they want to kill somebody, they say, 86 the son of a gun. I’m trying to keep the language nice and clear. They don’t use that term son of a gun. They use another term, but that’s a mob term for killing. Yeah.” Collins: “But do you really think your life was in danger? Because —” Trump: “Probably, I don’t know, you know, based on — based on what I’m seeing out there. Yeah.” Collins: “— the seashells?” Trump: “The — the people like Comey have created tremendous danger, I think, for politicians and others. You know, Comey is a dirty cop. He’s a very dirty cop. He cheated on the elections. He tried to help Hillary Clinton. As you know, he dismissed a lot of things that he should have proceeded with. I wasn’t involved, but he should have proceeded with, no, he’s a dirty cop. He’s a crooked man.”

@Kirbnation @CurtisHouck @kaitlancollins Oh, so you’re playing dumb then? So I have to explain to you that 86ing Trump means kicking him out of the presidency? Or maybe you are an idiot. Got it.

@pfimrite @CurtisHouck @kaitlancollins So Comey was playing Bartender and used used Seashells to shut off the non drinking patron. Got it.

l’espressione disgustata di Camilla è epica 😂😂😂

Some of the most effective questioning I’ve seen from @JasonCrowCO

More of the same rehearsed, stock answers from Trump’s judiciary nominees. We need judges who are fearless & strong, not spineless & weak—so fearful of Trump that they are unable to say Biden won the 2020 election.

@mmpadellan An absolute twit.

What a grotesquely embarrassing clod. He cut in front of Camilla AND King Charles. You MAGAs want us to stop describing him like that? Then tell him to STOP doing trashy, dumb shit that humiliates our entire country. Damn.

@robbystarbuck It’s possible to honor another country’s cherished and archaic system without wanting it yourself. A king in history is an autocratic dictator, not the figurehead England has. That’s what all right thinking Americans are against and what “No Kings” is about. But you knew that.

I think it’s hilarious that Democrats spent their political might and tons of money on "NO KINGS" protests just to give a standing ovation to the LITERAL King of England. You really can’t make this stuff up. Biggest bullshit artists of the century. 😂

@magachrchpastr Nobody needs to apologize to Trump for anything. The man is a psychopath, grifter and convicted felon. Victims don’t need to apologize to the culprit.

So many Libs are defending Jimmy Kimmel's tasteless jokes by pointing to President Trump's many derogatory and inflammatory statements over the years. But how about if you apologize first? Extend the olive branch, and I bet President Trump will respond in kind🙏🇺🇸

@gothburz Pretty wordy. You could use an editor.

I am a managing editor at a national news organization you have heard of. I have held this title for nine years, which means I have attended nine White House Correspondents' Dinners, killed four stories, and produced a newsroom that hasn't won a Pulitzer in six years but hasn't lost an advertiser in four. Let me tell you how American journalism works. I am telling you because nobody told me. I had to learn it the way everyone learns it. Slowly. And then all at once. Every morning I attend a 9 AM editorial meeting where eleven people decide what 340 million Americans should care about. Our combined household income is roughly $2.8 million. None of us has ever staffed a newsroom that covers a community where the median household income is under $45,000. We live in Washington. We live in New York. We live in the zip codes our readers were priced out of in 2019. We decide what matters. That is the job. I have killed four stories in nine years. Only four. My predecessor averaged eleven per year. We do not call it killing. We call it deprioritizing. Sometimes we call it revisiting the angle. Sometimes we call it timing. A story about an advertiser's supply chain practices gets revisited. A story about a senator's stock trades gets revisited. A story about a pharmaceutical company that spends $1.4 million a year with us gets revisited for fourteen months until the reporter who brought it stops bringing it. That's editorial process. A metro reporter brought that pharmaceutical story to the meeting once. Fourteen months of work. Solid sourcing. Three former employees on the record. The room went quiet. I said we needed to revisit the angle. She revised it. I said we needed to revisit the timing. She revised it again. I said the sourcing needed to be bulletproof. She added two more sources. I said we should circle back after the quarterly review. She left the paper eight months later. She works in communications for a nonprofit in New Mexico now. Makes $38,000. I did not raise my voice. I did not send a single email about that story. I did not have to. Silence is the editor's veto. It requires no memo. It leaves no evidence. And the reporter learns. They always learn. That's editorial independence. I have reassigned two reporters who pushed too hard. Nobody told me to reassign them. That is important. Nobody tells you. The architecture does the work. You learn which stories get praised in the morning meeting and which ones produce silence. The praised ones involve the people we had dinner with last month. The silent ones involve the people who pay for the dinner. I keep the WHCD pins in a bowl on my desk. Nine of them. One from each year. When new hires visit my office they see the pins and they understand what a successful career in journalism looks like. That is mentorship. My editor taught me the same way. 2004. My first year at the paper. I had a story about a defense contractor billing the Pentagon $1,200 for a component that cost $35 to manufacture. Four sources. One on the record. My editor said the sourcing needed work. I revised. He said we should circle back after the appropriations vote. I waited. He said maybe the defense beat reporter should take the lead. The defense beat reporter had a profile series running on the same contractor. He needed access. The profile ran three months later. It won a regional Murrow. I did not bring my story back. My editor kept his WHCD pins framed above his desk. I remember counting them — fourteen — while he explained the timing wasn't right. Now I keep mine in a bowl. The bowl is bigger. That's training. In 2025, Gallup measured public trust in mass media at 28 percent. The lowest in the poll's fifty-year history. The first time it dropped below 30. When Gallup started asking in the 1970s, it was 72 percent. We have lost 44 points of public confidence in two generations. I was on the task force. Seven editors. Two consultants billing $400 an hour. We met for four months. I brought the Gallup numbers to the first meeting. I did not bring the advertiser revenue spreadsheet. Nobody did. We identified the problem in the second meeting. Misinformation. Social media algorithms. Media literacy. The problem was external. We were certain. The consultants were certain. We drafted a transparency initiative and proposed a series of op-eds explaining our editorial standards to the audience that no longer reads us. I wrote one of the op-eds. It was about our commitment to fearless, independent journalism. I wrote it in the same office where I had deprioritized the pharmaceutical story six months earlier. The op-ed ran on a Tuesday. The pharmaceutical company renewed its contract the following quarter. The other 72 percent have a media literacy problem. Six corporations control 90 percent of American media. In 1983, it was fifty. I know this because I have worked for three of them. Each acquisition was announced with a town hall. Each town hall included the phrase "editorial independence." I have attended eleven town halls. The phrase has never not been said. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street hold top shareholder positions in all six. The same three asset managers that own my newsroom also own the defense contractor from my first story, the pharmaceutical company whose ad revenue holds up my floor, and the insurance conglomerate whose CEO sat two seats from me at last year's dinner. I did not make this connection in the editorial meeting. I made it at 2 AM on a Saturday reading a ProPublica investigation written by someone who left our paper in 2019. She does not attend the dinner. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Marc Benioff bought Time. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times. Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. I was at the dinner the year Bezos came for the first time. He was seated at the head table. The room applauded. I clapped. I remember clapping. That's civic engagement. I attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner every year. Have for nine years. I have the seating chart saved on my phone from the day the assignments come out. The theme is always about the First Amendment. The banners always say something about a free press for a free people. This year the WHCA replaced the comedian with a mentalist — a man who professionally performs what he describes as "embellishment and partial truths" — because the comedy slot had become unpredictable. The last comedian called the president what he is. They stopped inviting comedians. The mentalist is better. He deceives people in what he calls "an ethical way." That's programming. The WHCA president — a CBS White House correspondent — described the dinner as a chance for the press and the president to get together in a different context and recognize the important relationship, despite how complicated it might be. I found this eloquent. It is exactly what I would have said. We want to be around our subject. Not adversarial to it. Not above it. Around it. Close enough to be invited to the after-party at the French Ambassador's residence. Close enough that the press secretary knows your first name. Close enough that a rescinded dinner invitation would feel like a professional consequence rather than an editorial decision. That's access. Access is how you build trust. Trust is how you get the story. Getting the story is the job. 250 journalists signed a letter asking for a "forceful defense of press freedom" from the podium at this year's dinner. The letter named the president. It listed his actions in detail. It was sent to the organization hosting the dinner where the president would be the guest of honor. The dinner is a celebration of the First Amendment held in the presence of the man who is arresting reporters, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and using the FCC to selectively enforce the equal time rule. The letter asked for a forceful defense. What it got was a mentalist. That took courage. Two hundred and fifty signatures. Meanwhile, 136 newspapers closed in 2025. Two per week. Since 2005, 3,500 newspapers have shut down or merged. Fifty million Americans now live in communities with limited or no local journalism. Newspaper employment has dropped 75 percent since 2005. Web traffic to the hundred largest newspapers fell 45 percent in four years. A hedge fund called Alden Global Capital owns more than two hundred of those papers through a holding company. Their model is efficient. Buy the paper. Cut the newsroom. Extract the revenue. Let it close when the revenue stops. They have done this to the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News. My colleagues at other outlets call this vulture capitalism. I call it a different business model. Everyone has one. That's portfolio management. We did not cover this at the editorial meeting. We were discussing the seating chart. The seating chart matters. Proximity to the head table correlates with source quality. I have the data. The pipeline runs one direction. A journalist's median salary is $60,280. A public relations specialist makes $69,780. Corporate communications exceeds $150,000. We train investigators for five years on $34,000 starting salaries and then export them to the companies they were supposed to investigate. That is not a pipeline problem. That is talent development. We contribute human capital to the broader communications ecosystem. Google and Facebook take more than half of every digital advertising dollar. We compete for what remains. The pharmaceutical company's $1.4 million is not an advertiser. It is a load-bearing wall. That's the business model. Jen Psaki left the podium and went to MSNBC. Ari Fleischer left the podium and went to Fox. I have had drinks with both of them. Not at the same event. At the same event it would suggest the podium and the press table are interchangeable. They are not interchangeable. The career paths are simply adjacent. That's networking. Networking is how you build a career. A career is how you serve the public interest. I am writing a book. My agent says it could advance in the low six figures if the sourcing holds. The sourcing requires access. Access requires that my sources trust me. Trust requires that when I write about them, they recognize themselves. I sent the first three chapters to a source last month. He returned them with two corrections. Both were accurate. One removed a detail about a policy decision that would have been embarrassing. I accepted both. The detail was not essential to the narrative. The source is essential to the next three chapters. The sources get the manuscript before publication. The public gets the book fourteen months later for $28. The advance will pay for the renovation I have been putting off since the last round of layoffs made me nervous about spending. That's the craft at its highest level. Last month I saw her name. A newsletter published by the nonprofit in New Mexico. She was covering water contamination on tribal land. Nine thousand readers. Clean sourcing. The kind of work that wins the awards we give each other. I typed three words into an email and deleted them. Then I pulled up next year's WHCD guest list. That's priorities. Yesterday, a satirist wrote a fictional piece about journalists at the correspondents' dinner. It reached 3 million people. A Fox News White House correspondent with 188,000 followers called the satirist a "lunatic." She wrote: "No part of this is true — including the timing of events he couldn't even manage to get right in fabricating this BS." Her tweet reached 357,000 people. She used a platform built on the First Amendment to fact-check a fictional job title in a satire about journalists who prioritize the wrong thing. Someone added a Community Note. To fiction. A New York Post columnist with 869,000 followers wrote a defense of the wine-taking. "What is this guy's problem?" she asked. "The wine was there for the guests to drink." She asked if the satirist wanted everyone to start screaming hysterically. She did not ask why 3 million people found the piece more credible than the institution it described. Others called it AI. "AI" is what you call writing that makes you uncomfortable when you cannot argue with what it says. The institutional immune system activated exactly as designed: identify the threat, classify it, neutralize it, resume operations. That's media literacy. The satirist wrote that a woman checked the vintage during an evacuation. The profession reenacted it in the replies. The satirist said journalists would prioritize the wrong thing. The journalists responded by prioritizing the wrong thing. The correspondent checked the byline. The columnist defended the wine. The Community Note verified the fiction. Nobody verified the 28 percent. That's editorial judgment. I have been in this industry for twenty-two years. I have watched us go from 72 percent trust to 28 percent. In any other industry this would be a catastrophic product failure. In ours it is an audience problem. The audience does not understand us. We will fix this with a podcast. I have been asked about all of it. The closures. The consolidation. The revolving door. The dinner. The trust numbers. I have answers for each one. Good answers. The business model changed. Scale creates efficiency. Government experience makes better journalists. Proximity to power is how you hold it accountable. Trust is a lagging indicator. I have given these answers at conferences. I have given them on panels. The foundation that funded the last panel on "Restoring Public Trust" is a subsidiary of the holding company that closed eleven of the newspapers. These are separate issues. Unrelated. I have been doing this for twenty-two years and I can tell you with certainty that the declining trust, the consolidation, the proximity to power, the revolving door, the advertiser sensitivity, the dinner, the wine, and the silence in the editorial meeting are all separate issues. I am one of the good ones. I track the trust numbers. I attend the dinner for the right reasons. I keep the pins because I believe in the mission. The proximity is incidental. The access is necessary. The silence in the editorial meeting is just how editorial meetings work. Once a year, we put on black tie, sit next to the people we are supposed to hold accountable, toast to the First Amendment with wine we didn't pay for, and call it a free press. The wine is $76 a bottle. It was included. I am already looking at next year's seating chart.

@AriFleischer Oh shut up, you hypocrite!

This is another example showing how Barack Obama is one of the most divisive figures in American politics today. So many of our divisions were caused by the smug, demeaning and narrow-minded way he treats his opponents. Here, he pretends to not know the truth about the would-be assassin, although the facts of his left wing views were public hours before Obama’s tweet. It’s classic Obama - pretend to be conciliatory while he is the one who creates the divide. You would hope that Obama would condemn the left after the left tries to kill a President. But that’s too much to ask. Once again, Obama proves himself to be a classless divider of our country.

@jayypatriot I don’t believe that for a second.

So many are saying Trump fell. What really happened was Trump went down to pick up Melania, who was crawling to safety, while the SS was pushing him to be safe! Trump risked his own life to protect his wife. That’s a real man. Real men protect their wives.

@NinerNick_22 @sportslarryk True re James. He was the best back in training camp before injury.

@sportslarryk It's the same story every year, and every year they look dumber and dumber. Look at the Nick Martin and Jordan Watkins picks last year. Both were taken 100+ spots before consensus big boards. Their drafting makes no sense. Didn't even give Jordan James a shot.

Value be damned. Either the #49ers are smarter or dumber than the rest. Their board did NOT align w/the consensus opinions. Time will tell all.

This photo should be on the front page of every single newspaper in America today.

A viral clip of Hillary Clinton correctly predicting Trump would not accept his election loss has resurfaced, as Trump tries to erase his 2020 loss from history.