Washington – President Donald Trump’s new communications chief says television cameras can start rolling again in the White House briefing room.
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Anthony Scaramucci — the Wall Street financier who joined the administration last week — tweeted on Monday that “the TV Cameras are back on.”
Under Press Secretary Sean Spicer — who resigned over Scaramucci’s new role — the daily press briefings had become must-see TV. But in recent weeks, Spicer moved into a more behind the scenes role, putting the briefings largely in the hands of his deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who made them off-camera events.
On Friday, Scaramucci accepted his new position at an on-camera briefing, and announced that Sanders will replace Spicer as press secretary. The last on-camera White House briefing prior to that was June 29.
Scaramucci said that going forward, the briefings will be back on camera.
“We’re televising the briefings. We went to audio as an experiment and now we’re back on audio and video,” he said Monday. “I talked to the president about it this morning.”
Scaramucci said that if there was a reason to go off-camera, he or Sanders would explain why.
Over the weekend, Scaramucci pledged on Fox News to begin “an era of a new good feeling” and said he hopes to “create a more positive mojo.”
Spicer’s briefings became memorable television in the early days of the administration.
His tenure got off to a rocky start, when on Trump’s first full day, Spicer claimed that the media inaccurately portrayed the size of Trump’s inauguration audience and stormed out of the briefing room without answering questions.
Spicer, who often displayed a fiery demeanor in tense on-camera exchanges with reporters, became part of culture in the way few people in his job have, particularly through an indelible impersonation by Melissa McCarthy on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
She portrayed Spicer as a hostile figure who tore through the briefing room on a portable podium, willing to attack the press.