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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the Trump White House would henceforth determine which reporters would be part of the press pool and allowed into the Oval Office and Air Force One. Previously, the elitist White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) had made those selections.
“As you all know, for decades, a group of DC-based journalists, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore,” Ms. Leavitt said at a press briefing late last month. “I am proud to announce that we are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations. Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team.”
While not excluding legacy media outlets from continuing to be represented in the small press pools, the plan announced by Press Secretary Leavitt is to add “additional streaming services” and other outlets that had been previously “denied access.”
This announcement followed the White House’s decision to revoke Associated Press’s access to President Trump in the Oval Office and Air Force One. The AP had refused to change its stylebook entry for the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America,” which is the new name that President Trump gave to this body of water. A federal judge denied AP’s motion for an emergency order immediately restoring its press pool access privileges but scheduled a more extensive hearing on March 20th. AP’s reporters and photographers still retain their White House press passes and access to White House briefings.
The White House Correspondents’ Association reacted furiously to its loss of the exclusive privilege to pick who among themselves is allowed into the Oval Office and Air Force One as part of the press pool. The WHCA issued an absurd self-serving statement denouncing the White House’s new press pool policy as a “move” that “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.” In the WHCA’s insular world, giving non-traditional media outlets opportunities to be a part of the press pool, along with legacy media outlets, and to ask the president their own questions directly is somehow destructive of a free press.
It turns out that the legacy media are all for inclusivity except when their own exclusive privileged status is adversely affected.
The president of the United States is free to choose whom to invite into the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One. Freedom of the press does not mean that an exclusive club of White House correspondents gets to decide as a constitutional right which journalists have such privileged access. Indeed, the president does not have to invite any journalists at all into these more intimate spaces.
The media outlets that are not included in the press pool on any given day receive feeds and notes from the press pool participants immediately, which they can use as they wish. The Trump administration has not imposed restrictions on what content the pool participants send out to other media outlets or restrictions on what the media can publish.
Moreover, White House correspondents from the legacy media outlets, including the AP, can still attend and participate in all regular press briefings, which now have seats added in the briefing room for less traditional outlets as well.
President Trump has been more accessible to the media than any other president in modern history, despite all the biased and misleading reporting directed against him. This is in stark contrast to his predecessor Joe Biden, who hid from the press as much as he could. Mr. Biden’s handlers selected the journalists who were allowed to ask him questions during the few formal press conferences that Biden held, and they provided him with cheat sheets. Nevertheless, many members of the Washington press corps treated Joe Biden with kid gloves and helped enable the scandalous coverup of his cognitive decline for years.
The Biden White House also arbitrarily took away what are called “hard” press passes from 422 reporters. These passes had allowed them extended regular access to White House press briefings and to the White House grounds. The White House Correspondents’ Association was radio silent. There was no WHCA statement claiming that the Biden administration had torn at the independence of a free press when it stripped 422 reporters of their hard press passes. The WHCA “has taken an officially noncommittal stance,” according to the Washington Post.
The Trump administration is working to restore those passes which the Biden administration had arbitrarily revoked. More generally, President Trump’s openness to answering barrages of questions from the press, including blatantly hostile ones, on numerous occasions for extensive periods of time is staggering.
But the White House Correspondents’ Association and its leftwing members are recklessly pushing the false narrative that the Trump administration is suppressing freedom of the press. As Miranda Devine wrote in her February 27th New York Post column, “the WHCA and its members have lost the right to pose as guardians of free speech.”