Katie Couric and Margaret Sullivan demanded Tuesday that news organizations immediately “push back, hard” against President Trump’s escalating verbal attacks on journalists, calling the White House press corps’ silence “deafening” after Trump told Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs to be “Quiet, piggy” aboard Air Force One.
The former CBS Evening News anchor and the former New York Times public editor said the insult—delivered as Jacobs pressed Trump on Jeffrey Epstein questions—was only the latest example of deliberate humiliation that must not be normalized.
Couric urged the White House Correspondents’ Association to convene an emergency meeting with top news executives and issue a unified condemnation rather than leaving individual reporters to face the abuse alone.
Both tied the incident to a broader second-term assault on the press: Trump has posted 64 direct attacks on journalists on Truth Social in his first 100 days, pardoned 13 January 6 defendants convicted of assaulting reporters, and launched six FCC investigations into media companies.
Couric called Paramount Global’s recent settlement of Trump’s $15 billion defamation suit over a 60 Minutes edit “mortifying” evidence of corporate capitulation.
Sullivan warned that without collective, institutional resistance—beyond sympathetic tweets from colleagues—the aggression will only worsen and further erode public trust in journalism. Couric, now independent, added that regardless of how the public feels about the media, “they should not be tolerating this level of bullying and demeaning and insulting language.”