Dana Perino revealed she flipped off combative White House reporters behind a water cup while smiling, a secret habit she says gave her defiance against a TV-hungry press.
Former White House press secretary Dana Perino told Sean Hannity she used to hide a middle finger under her hand at the podium, smiling and nodding through tough questions from reporters she believed were chasing airtime.
Perino, who served President George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009 and now co-anchors Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom,” described the move on Hannity’s “Hang Out with Sean Hannity” podcast. She framed it as a small act of quiet pushback that kept her composed on camera.
Fox News reported that she kept the habit under wraps for years before putting it in her 2015 memoir and revisiting it with Hannity.
At the daily White House briefing in Washington, D.C., Perino said she would place her hand over a cup of water and hold the finger up the whole time a combative reporter talked.
She told Hannity she stayed polite on the surface.
"I would just sit there with my hand over my cup and just flip him off the entire time he was talking,"
Perino said she smiled and nodded while the questions came.
"They'd be asking questions. I'd smile through it... [and] nod,"
The move, she said, gave her a bit of “defiance and confidence,” something she likened jokingly to liquid courage. A photo from one of those briefings on Sept. 26, 2008, shows her at the podium in that same room.
Fox News has continued stacking former White House voices and on-air talent in recent seasons, including when Fox added Karoline Leavitt as a contributor after her own White House exit.
Perino did not name the reporters. She said the pattern was clear: some loaded up long windups to land a blow that would make the network packages that night.
"They would do anything to get on TV that night,"
She added that they would “give a big windup and try to hit you so that they could make sure that they could get on air for one of the networks.”
That pressure, she argued, has only grown. “It’s worse now with social media,” Perino said, pointing to an incentive structure that rewards the loudest exchange over the clearest answer.
Viewers can also watch her recount the podium habit in the related Fox News video clip tied to the same account.
Network programming moves have kept pace with those media fights, as when Emily Compagno became permanent cohost on “The Five.”
Perino first published the anecdote in her 2015 memoir, “And the Good News Is...”. When she later told it on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the late host lit up.
"When I did [Limbaugh's] radio show, he said, this is the best story ever,"
Hannity, for his part, treated the account as one of the greatest stories ever told by a White House press secretary.
Perino also recalled a conversation with former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry about whether letting cameras into the briefing room had done more harm than good. The cameras turned every exchange into potential television, and the performance incentives followed.
Admissions about what happened behind the official line still draw attention across the industry, much as they did when Fox brought on Melissa DeRosa after her own public admission on the Cuomo nursing-home matter.
Perino’s telling stays light, but the target is serious: a press corps that too often played for the clip instead of the facts, and a briefing room where the cameras rewarded the combat.
When the people holding the microphones optimize for airtime, the public gets theater. A quiet middle finger under a water cup was one press secretary’s way of keeping her footing without feeding the show.