On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House Press Office will now decide which reporters will get to cover the president daily, ending the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) exclusive role in selecting journalists for the job. Leavitt clarified that corporate media outlets would still be included, but the WHCA’s power to handpick the press pool is over.

Unsurprisingly, the WHCA and its members quickly cried foul and feigned outrage about “free press.”

WHCA President Eugene Daniels said the change “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”

Peter Baker of The New York Times went so far as to compare the change — expanding access for independent media — to the Kremlin taking “over its own press pool.”

“None of this will stop professional news outlets from covering this president in the same full, fair, tough and unflinching way that we always have,” Baker said in a post on X. “Government efforts to punish disfavored organizations will not stop independent journalism.”

But their so-called concern for “free press” rings hollow. When freedom of the press was actually under attack, the WHCA stood by silent and indifferent because the press was more concerned about protecting then-President Joe Biden and Democratic interests.

When the Biden White House revoked 442 reporters’ press credentials, the WHCA took “an officially noncommittal stance.”

The WHCA selectively defended outlets and reporters, filing amici briefs on behalf of CNN’s Jim Acosta and Brian Karem after their hard passes were revoked. The WHCA also released a statement in defense of CNN’s Kaitlin Collins when she was barred from an event.

But, as the Daily Caller’s Amber Athey wrote in these pages, “the WHCA voted to remove conservative One America News Network (OANN) from the briefing room rotation for not abiding by its contrived social distancing guidelines, even though OANN’s correspondent had been personally invited to be in the briefing room by the Trump administration.”

The WHCA was notably silent when The Federalist, along with The Daily Wire, sued the State Department for blacklisting conservative media outlets. And as The Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis pointed out, “When the Biden White House demanded that big tech companies like Facebook and Google censor conservative media outlets for the crime of critically reporting on the Biden White House, the WHCA didn’t object.”

When former President Joe Biden was caught relying on a cheat sheet with pre-arranged questions, the WHCA stayed silent about the lack of “free” press happening. Ironically, one of the reporters on the cheat sheet, the Los Angeles Times’ Courtney Subramanian, was later elected to the WHCA Board in 2023.

The WHCA’s absence in defending actual free speech has been glaring, and their treatment of independent and conservative media has been nothing short of contemptuous.

A seating chart for the presidential press briefing room from February 2022 revealed just nine of the nearly 50 media seats were for outlets that lean conservative, as my colleague Maisey Jefferson reported. “Of this already small group, more than half are placed in the back row.”

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But it’s not just the WHCA’s collective bias that’s troubling — it’s the swampy personalities that infest it. Take PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, who praised the 1619 Project and called its creator a “national treasure.” She also accused then-U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams (who is black) of being racist while attacking President Donald Trump for using the phrase “Kung Flu” to refer to the Chinese coronavirus, as pointed out by my colleague Tristan Justice. Alcindor’s constant baseless attacks earned her a prestigious WHCA award, only further exposing the organization’s true agenda.

As The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway put it, the WHCA is a “multi-tiered gatekeeping scam” designed to ensure that the corporate press controls the narrative and can push their own elitist, left-wing agenda at the expense of true journalistic integrity. The only reason the WHCA is upset about his rule change is because it threatens their monopoly on so-called “free press.”