The White House Correspondents Association spoke out after the Trump press office announced that the Associated Press would no longer have a seat in the White House briefing room or on Air Force One. Supporters of the AP immediately wrapped themselves in the First Amendment, though we're still unable to find the "any media outlet that wants a seat in the WH briefing room can have one" part of 1A.
To further trigger the lib media, the White House now says they will control which outlets are allowed in the briefing room, not the WHCA:
The White House announced on Tuesday that the administration — not an independent group of journalists — will determine which outlets have access to the president as part of a pool allowed into the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One and into other meetings and events that cannot accommodate the full press corps.
The decision comes a day after the administration won a temporary ruling allowing it to bar the Associated Press from pooled events, in retaliation for the news wire’s decision to resist President Donald Trump’s demand that it rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Brian Stelter has been all over this story and highlighting how the Trump press office is breaking "decades of precedent" by selecting which media outlets to exclude from the White House:
"Donald Trump’s White House kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the pool of journalists set to follow the president on Wednesday, breaking with decades of precedent, and insisting they have the ability to pick and choose which reporters cover the president." https://t.co/X9SvHJMhuI
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 26, 2025
A clear-cut headline here: "The White House is now deciding who can cover the president, reversing decades of precedent" https://t.co/a040Q3Zz66
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 25, 2025
Stelter and select CNN panelists weren't always as receptive to that "precedent."
Here's a video via @mazemoore from about four years ago at the start of Biden's term proving that not all media outlets were considered protected by the aforementioned precedent. Watch:
March, 2021. Brian Stelter does a segment on if Fox reporters should be removed from the White House Press Pool.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) February 26, 2025
"Should it be a part of the White House Press Pool...should it be afforded the privileges that come with news gathering?"
This is CNN. pic.twitter.com/OuGruP3rJt
There weren't even many outlets in the briefing room that didn't lean left, and these people wanted to kick one of them out.
Is the White House press pool ideologically 50/50 or overwhelmingly liberal? The answer is "overwhelmingly liberal" with a few conservative outlets in place. If anything, the Trump admin needs to get rid of a lot more liberal outlets to even it up.
— John Hawkins (@johnhawkinsrwn) February 26, 2025
And they wanted to get rid of one of the few right leaning news organizations.
— MAZE (@mazemoore) February 26, 2025
The legacy media's lost control and relevance and watching them come to that realization will drive them increasingly crazy in the coming weeks, months and years (if they manage to make it years).
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