Hate your job? Looking to hop into another field? Think twice before you consider hopping into mine.
According to Careercast.com’s Jobs Rated report, weighing such factors as stress, income and future, reporter was rated as 2016’s worst job in America (taxi driver and pest-control worker also made the bottom 10). Why do I get the feeling the 2017 list will have a new No. 1: Media flak for President Donald Trump? Yes, I’m talking about you, Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer.
Fresh out of the gate, White House Press Secretary Spicer was sent out on a kamikaze “Are you going to believe your lying eyes or what we tell you?” mission. He scolded the media for reporting Trump’s inaugural crowd was smaller than President Barack Obama’s.
When reporters said it was simply the truth, Spicer said aerial photos of the event were “intentionally framed . . . to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.” Yes, yooge crowds! Except they weren’t.
Soon after, he tried to defend Trump’s claim that he lost the popular vote because “three to five million voted illegally.” Zero evidence of this. Spicer sweated it out, batting back reporters’ challenges before bolting off the stage.
Meanwhile, Trump senior adviser Conway has been scrambling around on Sunday news shows, trying to make her boss’s latest nutty, self-serving utterances seem normal. Why did Trump ask attendees at The National Prayer Breakfast to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger and higher “New Celebrity Apprentice” ratings? Uhm, it would create more jobs?
Even Conway admits it’s not easy. Before the election, she approved her portrayal by Kate McKinnon on “Saturday Night Live” as someone putting out fires in a “Kellyanne Conway’s Day Off” sketch, saying McKinnon “nailed it.”
Conway has learned being a media flak for politicians is a stressful, thankless job. She previously worked for presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, who called Trump a “pathological liar.” Now Conway’s the one who has to defend what she called the administration’s “alternative facts,” and is paying the price. She admitted on Fox News that she “hasn’t slept in a month.”
Join the crowd.
Playwright Mike Vogel blogs at newyorkgritty.net.
