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Last week, the White House invited a handful of giddy conservative influencers to “policy briefings” with top administration officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel. The influencers, who included OANN anchor and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, Rogan O’Handley (a.k.a. DC Draino), and Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, happily walked away with binders adorned with the Justice Department seal and branded “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.”
It turns out there wasn’t any new grist in them for the conspiracy-theory mill. “We’re all waiting for juicy stuff, and that’s not what’s in this binder at all,” podcaster Liz Wheeler wrote on X. “What we were looking for was hidden from us.” Still, the Roosevelt Room gathering was indicative of the Trump administration’s evolving relationship with the press. “These folks have larger followings than most mainstream-media ‘reporters,’” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X. “The media landscape has changed, and we are fully embracing it here at the Trump White House!”
The influencer briefing came in the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent memory for the Washington press corps, which is not only coping with a nonstop news cycle but battling a White House that has blocked mainstream outlets like the Associated Press from events and, for the first time in a century, said it would determine which news outlets are part of the press pool, long the purview of the independent White House Correspondents’ Association. And while Trump has always made life difficult for journalists, this time they find themselves divided, squabbling, and unsure whether they even want to present a united front. Said Peter Baker, the New York Times reporter who has been covering the White House for three decades, “It’s as volatile a moment for the White House press corps as I’ve ever seen.”
The troubles began on February 11, when the White House blocked the Associated Press from an event in the Oval Office; on February 14, the White House made the ban official, saying the AP would be barred from entering the Oval Office and traveling on Air Force One over the news outlet’s decision to continue using the name Gulf of Mexico for the body of water Trump had recently renamed the Gulf of America. Other news outlets signaled their support for the AP, with dozens, from CNN to the Washington Post to Fox News, signing a letter urging the White House to reverse its decision. But notably, they continued to show up to press events even as their colleagues at the AP could not. After all, they still had a job to do.
A few days later, the AP sued Trump officials over the ban, a move that greatly pissed off the White House because it had let an AP photographer (but not a reporter) into an event earlier that week as an olive branch. A few days after that, the White House announced it would also determine the participants in the daily presidential press pool, the small group of reporters allowed to observe the president’s actions and record his remarks in small spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One, then communicate their reporting to the rest of the corps. The makeup of the pool — a rotating cast of print and/or online reporters, TV cameramen, and photographers — has long been decided by the WHCA, which represents hundreds of correspondents, in part to ensure that friendly outlets are not the only ones to get access to the president. The move was intended to allow “new media” outlets “to share in this awesome responsibility,” said Leavitt, who introduced a “new media” seat in the briefing room during her first presser that so far has been occupied by various journalists, including Axios’ Mike Allen, Breitbart’s Matt Boyle, and Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski.
The two actions by the White House made it clear that if journalists do anything Trump doesn’t like, they could be kicked out. The implications for the fate of the free press were also clear. “There will be a chilling effect. People will be much more careful about what questions they shout,” one political reporter said. “Americans don’t realize it’s a big deal because they don’t understand how Washington works, and they think we’re privileged anyways. And White House reporters are annoying, but it matters who is, on a day-to-day basis, around Trump to ask questions that the administration hasn’t screened or planted.” Especially, they noted, because Trump, unlike many other politicians, will actually give you an answer: “His advisers will spin you or ignore your calls, but he’ll just say it.”
Yet even while reporters agree the White House is way out of line, they don’t agree on how to respond. Initially, WHCA president Eugene Daniels said the association would no longer be facilitating the pool now that it is under White House control and that it would be up to each news organization to decide whether it wanted to participate. Daniels explained that, with the White House controlling the process, the WHCA couldn’t ensure the veracity of the pool reports.
That decision frustrated some reporters, who felt the WHCA was just picking up its ball and going home. What was the association for — other than the big fundraising party it throws in April — if not for a moment like this? “I don’t think the solution is to have the White House control complete access, but the WHCA has shit the bed on this,” one White House reporter said. “We got an email from Eugene basically being like, ‘You’re on your own, here’s the questions you should ask the White House,’ and a lot of reporters were like, ‘You’re the one who is supposed to be asking these questions.’”
At the same time, many also recognize that the association was in a difficult spot, torn between asserting its independence and keeping some semblance of control over the pool. “It’s a very tough moment, and there are no easy answers for the WHCA and its leaders,” another White House reporter said, while acknowledging that “a lot of us wanted a more vocal, robust response to meet the moment.” Daniels personally is a vulnerable target for right-wing figures in and around the White House as an openly gay Black correspondent for Politico (and soon MSNBC) who was seen as the Kamala Harris whisperer during her presidential run — the embodiment, in other words, of a woke press corps the White House is keen to push around.
This week, Daniels seemed to revise his initial guidance and announced a new system would be put in place. Basically, the pool reports will resume (though they won’t be called pool reports) as long as the White House continues to use poolers who are part of the WHCA. But it remains to be seen what the WHCA will do if the White House picks, say, Posobiec to write the pool report. “We don’t know how the WH intends to operate, but on the day that they select someone who is not a part of our rotations, we will need to lean on another constituency such as radio, wires, or TV to assist getting that information out,” Daniels wrote.
So far, the White House has largely kept things running as it did under the WHCA. But it has added some more friendly faces: right-wing broadcaster Brian Glenn, who dates Marjorie Taylor Greene, was picked to be in the Oval Office during Trump’s disastrous meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which Glenn asked the Ukrainian president why he wasn’t wearing a suit. And the other day, the administration kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the pool. The White House then asked The Wall Street Journal if it wanted to take HuffPost’s spot and it said no; later, the White House called Axios, which jumped at the opportunity. “It really just feels like they’re trying to pit organizations against each other and make people pick sides, and they know that,” one White House reporter said.
These are among the calculations news outlets are being forced to make internally: Do they take another outlet’s spot if the White House offers it? What happens if they are the ones who get kicked out? Conversations ultimately come back to the bigger question for the press with this administration: How far will they go to preserve their independence? “That is our larger debate — do we continue to participate in this pool or not?” said Baker, noting that in doing so, they’re “seemingly giving credibility to a government-run press pool, which is an anathema to us.” He added, however, “If you back out, it means the only questions being asked of the president end up being of the ‘Why are you so great?’ variety.”
“Where is the line, and who do you trust? You can be a conservative or liberal organization and still be a trustworthy pooler and journalist,” Baker said. But increasingly, he noted, “you’re seeing basically inherently political organizations masquerading as news organizations, calling themselves news organizations, and injecting themselves into our pool. And for the viewer at home watching this, it’s confusing. They don’t know the difference between Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend and the Washington Post.” Earlier this week, Jessica Reed Kraus, one of the influencers invited to the “Epstein Files” briefing, celebrated her “official induction into the White House press pool” as she joined CBS and Bloomberg to observe Melania Trump at the Capitol.
Like members of other groups, journalists are facing a problem of collective action. “If not all of us do it collectively, does it have an impact? The truth is, getting all the White House reporters to agree is like herding cats,” said Baker. “We’re competitive; each has our own interests, our own judgments.” And a boycott would just give the White House what it wants.
For now, reporters appear to be keeping their heads down and hoping the situation won’t get worse. “We still have access,” one White House reporter said. “If it turns to a point where the White House is saying CNN can’t come in because they didn’t like what it said, that’s an issue, and the problem is it could turn into that. I don’t know if it has.” After thinking about it for a moment, the reporter added, “With the exception, obviously, of the AP.”
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