Simon Ateba

Simon Ateba, Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa in Washington, discusses the challenges he has faced at the White House under former Press Secretary Jen Psaki after challenging her over the ban on eight African nations over the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and then more recently with Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, having ignored Ateba’s quesitons for seven months. Ateba also covers the remarkable story of how on 20 March when at the White House for a press briefing, instead of being allowed to ask questions, Ateba and other members of the press found themselves thrown into a political theatre where the cast of Ted Lasso was brought in to derail the White House press briefing (to discuss mental health). Ateba, ready to do his job to ask questions about the news of the day, attempted to ask questions as Jean-Pierre scolded him for engaging in his job as a journalist. Ateba addresses how the role of the White House press secretary has become politicised whereby this role has become a position of curating the news emanating from the White House by answering light-weight questions from legacy media representatives while ignoring the harder questions posed by journalists representing smaller, independent and/or non-western media. These practices, Ateba notes, have become so entrenched within institutions and power centres today that they represent the ethos of what is now known as the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”