CNN
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This week is a troubling turning point in the already-tense dynamic between the Trump White House and the press corps.
At the White House, and at key agencies like the Defense Department, the plan is obvious: Punish traditional journalists who ask tough questions and promote a parallel universe of pro-Trump media outlets.
Tuesday’s announcement about President Trump’s press operation taking over “press pool” organizing duties is part of the plan. The administration is clearly trying to exert more control over who asks questions – and what they ask.
Journalists, newsroom leaders and press freedom groups are all objecting to the changes, to no avail.
The “press pool” is a small rotating group of journalists who travel with the president at all times and cover photo ops, Q&As, cabinet meetings, and other events where there isn’t room for dozens of camera crews and correspondents.
Historically the White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the wider press corps, has managed the pool assignments. But not anymore.
Wednesday was the first day when the White House chose who would be in the pool – and who would not.
The correspondents’ association had listed HuffPost as Wednesday’s print representative in the pool, but Trump’s press operation threw out the list and chose Axios as the print pool member instead.
HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte has long been a thorn in Trump’s side, and Trump bristled at Dáte’s questions the last time he was in the pool.
On Wednesday morning Dáte tried to cover Trump’s cabinet meeting anyway, but he was denied entry, since it was open only to the press pool.
Dáte stood outside and talked with fellow reporters, then tweeted out one of the questions he would have liked to ask the president during the event.
A Reuters wire reporter was also cut from the Wednesday rotation. And The Associated Press, which was barred two weeks ago in a dispute over Trump’s “Gulf of America” decree, remains banned.
Perhaps most notably, staffers from two staunchly pro-Trump outlets, Newsmax and The Blaze, were added to the pool on Wednesday.
Editors at the sidelined news outlets are speaking out. In a rare joint statement on Wednesday, the top editors of The AP, Reuters and Bloomberg – the three wire services that were, until this month, daily fixtures in the press pool – said the White House’s changes are harmful to the public.
“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press,” the editors said. “We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle. It also harms the spread of reliable information to people, communities, businesses and global financial markets that heavily depend on our reporting.”
HuffPost editor Whitney Snyder was even more forceful, stating that “the White House must stop this cowardly behavior and restore HuffPost’s place in the press pool immediately.”
But that’s not going to happen. All the evidence indicates that the White House will continue to tighten its grip.
New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker didn’t say this lightly: “Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s reign,” the Trump White House’s pool takeover “reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to Baker on X with a clown emoji and called him a “left-wing stenographer” posing as a journalist. That’s profoundly unfair to Baker, but it reaffirmed that the Trump White House wants to have this fight, even as Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich warns that Republicans will regret it someday.
Heinrich told a Trump promoter on X, “if you think MAGA benefits from this in the long term, you’re dead wrong. You would not have trusted [a] Democratic admin to pick its own pool – but now that door is open.”
Leavitt and company claim they are trying to expand access to a greater number of media outlets, but that’s disingenuous at best, since these actions are punitive in nature. For example: Katie Miller, a top adviser to Elon Musk and DOGE, replied to Baker and Leavitt and said “guess he won’t be a pooler anytime soon.”
It is important to note, as Baker did, that “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.”
But it will stop some Americans from believing professional reporting. As Anna Merlan wrote for Mother Jones earlier this week, the Trump White House is propping up right-wing content creators who mostly opine rather than report, and who are cheering for Trump rather than challenging him.
“The administration has created a swell of flattering media coverage,” Merlan wrote, “a gauzy bubble around its every decision, no matter how destructive or incoherent.”