President Donald Trump owes his political success to many things, his personal skills as an entertainer and a negotiator high among them. But no factor explains the rise of Trump better than the capture of America’s elite institutions by far-left ideology and a resulting decline in public trust.
Whether it is in higher education, organized labor, or tech companies, the commanding heights of our culture and economy have become echo chambers for upper-income, college-educated elites who long ago abandoned any pretense of impartiality to push their own radical agenda.
That is the context for the announcement this week that White House communications staff will decide who participates in the press pool each day. The officials will take this power from the White House Correspondents’ Association, a voluntary group of print, television, radio, and online journalists that has organized the pool for more than 100 years.
“Legacy outlets who have participated in the press pool for decades will still be allowed to join,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained, “but we will also be offering the privilege to well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility.”
The impetus for Leavitt’s announcement is conflict with the Associated Press, which the White House banned from the press pool because it refuses to call what was the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, as Trump has since renamed it.
The AP is suing the Trump administration, hoping a federal court will force it to allow AP reporters back into the pool. In its complaint, the AP mentioned the role of the WHCA 52 times. Instead of deferring to the WHCA on which reporters should have access to the president, the White House will decide itself.
The reaction from the WHCA and other members of the press has been little short of apoplectic. WHCA President Eugene Daniels, who is leaving his job at Politico to host a show on left-wing MSNBC, said the move “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” and New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker compared it to “the early days of Putin’s reign” in Russia.
Contrast those reactions with what the WHCA and Baker said after former President Joe Biden’s administration revoked the White House press passes of over 400 conservative journalists. They had no view, took no exception, and said nothing.
They treat the First Amendment as threatened only when left-wing outlets are being limited.
The left-wing bias of organizations that lead the WHCA is impossible to avoid or deny. They are the same organizations that falsely reported that COVID-19 did not originate from a lab in China, that actively covered up Biden’s mental decline, and that denied the existence of a border crisis that became impossible and then, after acknowledging it, said either that there was nothing Biden could do to solve it or that he was trying to do what was needed and was being thwarted by Republicans under direction from Trump.
The Associated Press, in particular, has moved far outside the mainstream of public understanding, choosing to descend into the make-believe of transgender ideology, mandating the use of them/they pronouns and the use of the term “gender-affirming care.” It also forbade the terms “illegal immigrant” and “border crisis” from its immigration coverage, and during the 2020 summer of political violence, it forbade the use of the terms “riot” and “rioting.”
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There is a reason 36% of people now say they don’t trust mass media at all and just 31% say they trust it a “great deal” or “fair amount.”
The WHCA may think itself an “independent” and objective arbiter of truth, but its actions show otherwise. The public knows this. To borrow a phrase from the Democratic Party, no one elected the WHCA to anything, and the White House has every right to determine who will and who will not have special limited access to the president.