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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that it will decide which news outlets will be allowed into the pool, a group of journalists that rotate coverage of the president’s day-to-day activities.
The decision wrests the choice from the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, deepening the tensions between the Trump administration and mainstream media and breaking with decades of precedent.
Leavitt said the move would allow more “new media” into the pool, as well as outlets that “have long been denied the privilege to partake in this experience.”
The head of the White House Correspondents’ Association said the decision “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States... In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
The White House announcement is a signal to “follow the White House line or risk being kicked out as well,” The New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote. It could allow the administration to choose which reporters and outlets can observe and ask questions of the president at certain times, the outlet’s media columnist noted.
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The new directive is the latest in a string of actions by the Trump administration which, taken together, indicate a greater onslaught on American press norms, a legal expert wrote for Just Security: “These signs should be appreciated for what they are: a concerted push to align the U.S. information ecosystem with Trump’s entrenched view that the independent media is “truly the enemy of the people.”
The administration has so far barred The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One after it refused to use Trump’s preferred Gulf of America instead of the internationally recognized Gulf of Mexico to refer to the body of water in its copy. On Monday, a judge ruled that the White House can continue to restrict the AP’s access, but warned the law did not appear on the administration’s side.
Conservative outlets including Newsmax and Fox News supported the AP, with Newsmax noting the decision could set an unfortunate precedent: “We fear a future administration may not like something Newsmax writes and seek to ban us,” the cable news company said.