Trump White House Announces That It Will Decide Who Gets To Cover The Administration

Journalism

from the iron-fist dept

It’s a familiar playbook. When Donald Trump receives backlash from the public or the press for some action he’s taken, say barring AP News from White House press briefings and events because it won’t bow to his desire to rename parts of a large body of water, he doesn’t shrink. He doubles down. Every single time. All the more so when organizations like AP fight back, filing a lawsuit claiming First and Fourth Amendment infringements. No quarter will be given to the enemy, as it were, which, in this case, would be the press outlets that serve the American people.

That all of this is an obvious strongman approach to free speech matters not at all. After all, the administration and its quasi-government and opportunist sycophants is lousy with free speech hypocrites. It’s a doublespeak buffet for everyone, it seems, with fans of the administration happily cheering it along, not realizing that this is all going to boomerang back upon them eventually. But for now, the Star Wars line appears to at least partially apply.

And it’s only because of the willingness of some percentage of the country, and by extension those who represent them, that Trump can triple down as he’s doing now. No longer satisfied with attempting to bully one international news institution, he has now decided to exert an iron fist in controlling who gets access to the White House Press Pool, despite a century of precedent.

The White House said Tuesday that its officials “will determine” which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close — a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services. Leavitt cast the change as a modernization of the press pool, saying the move would be more inclusive and restore “access back to the American people” who elected Trump. But media experts said the move raised troubling First Amendment issues because the president is choosing who covers him.

“The White House press team, in this administration, will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing. She added at another point: “A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House.”

I shan’t mince words: this is complete bullshit. And, frankly, it’s transparently bullshit. The White House is not doing this to give any kind of press coverage “back to the American people.” It’s doing this to control who can ask, and by extension what will be asked, of the administration. And, if you’ve listened to any of the “new media” that has been getting invites and called on for questions in recent press briefings, it becomes all the more obvious. Some of the smaller outlets have put forth such hard-hitting questions which amount to, essentially: “Hey, you’ve done such an awesome job so far with literally everything. How do you feel about being so awesome?”

Already some outlets have lost some access. The White House kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the press pool, while Reuters had access to at least one briefing cut as well. Notably, neither organization has had a habit for bootlicking. But that shouldn’t matter. The absolute right thing to do here is for every press outlet, whatever its leanings, to boycott press briefings and events. Any outlet that does not do that until the Press Pool’s autonomy is restored is a propaganda organization by definition; a wing of the press that has relinquished editorial control to the government.

You can absolutely expect more lawsuits over this. And, save for a Supreme Court decision to abdicate its responsibility, this should end with a slap against the administration and a return to normal. The First Amendment implications of all of this should be obvious, after all.

”It means the president can pick and choose who covers the executive branch, ignoring the fact that it is the American people who through their taxes pay for the running of the White House, the president’s travels and the press secretary’s salary,” Jon Marshall, a media history professor at Northwestern University and author of “Clash: Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis,” said in a text.

Eugene Daniels, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the organization consistently expands its membership and pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.

“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president,” Daniels said in a statement. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

Again, the only sane move is for the press, all of the press, to boycott press briefings and events. They’re generally completely unnecessary to begin with. If the White House wants to control the questions it gets, then it should get none. If it wants to relay information to the public via the press, however, then it should do so while treating the press as an independent entity.

And in the end, if the only press outlet covering these briefings are PatriotPressForTrump.org, well, the public is smart enough to understand the implications of that.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, free speech, journalism, white house, white house press pool
Companies: associated press, huffington post, whca