On Monday afternoon, CNN host Brooke Baldwin told her viewers: "We have one ear to this White House briefing. We're waiting for the Q-and-A portion with Sarah Sanders." The existence of a White House briefing, of course, was news unto itself. Sanders, the White House's press secretary, hadn't held a formal briefing since December 18, leaving correspondents scrambling to figure out when she'd appear on Fox News so that they could ambush her somewhere on the White House grounds.
On Monday, however, Sanders convened a room of media types and said, "Missed you guys" as she passed the baton to three officials - national security adviser John Bolton, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow - to address US policy toward Venezuela.
The three finished their work just after 4pm, allowing Sanders to step up and take questions on the prospect of another shutdown, the employment of undocumented immigrants at President Donald Trump's golf club and other issues. As she jousted with the assembled media, however, CNN did something it doesn't routinely do: It stayed away.
CNN host Jake Tapper opened his show with an extensive discussion of the 2020 presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris, with whom Tapper held a CNN town hall in Des Moines. Moments later, the network aired a prepared package by White House reporter Kaitlan Collins on the first White House briefing of 2019 - complete with footage of Sanders, moments earlier, telling reporters that Trump doesn't want to do another government shutdown.
But it didn't go live from the White House briefing room.