Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

On Tuesday, a press briefing at the White House quickly turned into a public mockery of journalists, as deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders deflected questions in favor of deriding the press. Emboldened by a since-retracted article by CNN that involved Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci, Sanders took up the pulpit for a lambasting of reporters that was less official White House interview than scolding by Miss Trunchbull from Matilda.

It was then that Playboy correspondent Brian J. Karem used his question to push back on Sanders’s explicitly antijournalism message.

“If we make the slightest mistake, the slightest word is off, it is just an absolute tirade from a lot of people in this room,” Sanders said, speaking as the representative of an administration that lied about its inauguration crowd size less than 24 hours after taking office.

“But news outlets get to go on,” she went on, “day after day, and cite unnamed sources, use stories without sources ... you mentioned the Scaramucci story, where they had to have reporters resign.”

“Come on, you’re inflaming everybody right here, right now with those words,” Karem began, voice nearly quivering. “This administration has done that as well. Why in the name of heavens — any one of us, right, are replaceable. And any one of us, if we don’t get it right, the audience has the opportunity to turn the channel or not read us.”

“You have been elected to serve for four years at least,” he continued. “There’s no option other than that. We’re here to ask you questions. You’re here to provide the answers, and what you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country, who look at it and say, ‘See, once again, the president’s right, and everybody else out here is fake media,’ and everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.”

I have previously written about the role of the press secretary as a position that exists somewhere on a spectrum between head publicist and minister of propaganda, and addressing the White House’s lack of an accuracy standard is an extremely significant portion of Karem's statement. But I would like to first zero in on the emotional plea of his words: “Everybody in this room is only trying to do to their job.”