Pencil Sharpeners

   Refusing to answer a question and ejecting the questioner does not make the question go away.
   Yet that seems to be the policy of the Trump organization as it moves from campaign mode to governing mode.
   On Friday, aides escorted Andrea Mitchell of NBC News out of the room where a senior Mexican official was speaking to journalists after she asked several questions that supposedly were not permitted.
   Nevertheless, she persisted, and was soon ousted.

   Earlier, it was revealed that news media would not accompany Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on an official visit to Asia. This after the State Department finally began holding press briefings, the first since the change of administrations. Eventually, the department said it would reconsider, after major news organizations objected.
   Meanwhile, the State Department press spokesman admitted he was unaware that the senior Mexican government official was in Washington. All this as Tillerson seems to be boxed out of policy meetings with the president.
   During the election campaign, there were several instances of journalists being barred from political events featuring the candidate. Among these was the time Jorge Ramos of Univision was forcibly ejected from a meeting because the candidate supposedly did not like the way Ramos was covering the campaign.

   The moral of this collection of incidents is that you can't run a government the way you run a company. When a senior executive doesn't like the way an employee behaves, or objects to the kinds of questions the employee asks, he can fire the employee.
   But journalists assigned to cover the doings of the chief executive of the United States government do not work for that executive. They may be paid by the publisher of their news outlet, and in that sense they can be fired by the editor, but in a larger sense they work for the citizens of the country.
   They do not work for government officials, and any attempt to force them to cover a story the way the government wants it slanted is doomed to failure. Meanwhile, the question does not go away, but continues to be asked by other members of the media.
   And the more a politician rants, and the louder he protests about "fake news," the more reporters believe they are closer to the real story.