WASHINGTON DC – Reporters covering Donald Trump’s second month back in power knew something was up on Monday when the President selected the first question during his joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron. As the White House correspondents – some of the nation’s most seasoned, experienced journalists – raised their hands and preened in their seats, hoping that Trump might choose one of them, he instead selected a man called Brian.
Brian Glenn is a newcomer to the White House press corps, one of dozens of reporters to whom the closed doors of the building were suddenly opened after January’s inauguration. He represents an outlet called “Real America’s Voice TV”, a far-right network that broadcasts and live-streams pro-Trump propaganda 24 hours a day. Glenn’s partner, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, is one of Trump’s most loyal disciples on Capitol Hill and a promoter of conspiracy theories, including the claim that Jewish-owned space lasers are responsible for starting forest fires in California.
Glenn’s question on Monday was the reliable softball that Trump anticipated. He invited the President to wax lyrical about a fresh poll that the White House – in a separate press release – claimed “SHOWS MASSIVE SUPPORT FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP AND HIS AGENDA”. The President duly obliged and thanked Brian for his question.
Twenty-four hours later, the scale of the President’s ambition to upend decades of tradition within the White House press corps became apparent. On Tuesday, without any notice, the President’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the effective evisceration of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), the member body that has managed press relations with successive administrations since its inception in 1914.
Leavitt announced that from now on, the Trump administration – not the WHCA – will determine the composition of the daily press pool that covers Trump’s activities on behalf of all news organisations everywhere. The pool, consisting of nominated TV, radio, print and photo journalists, is a limited group of reporters who capture images of, and news about, the President in space-constrained areas including the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One and when Trump is traveling by motorcade in “The Beast”, his heavily armoured limousine.
“By deciding which outlets make up the limited press pool on a day-to-day basis”, Leavitt claimed “the White House will be restoring power back to the American people who President Trump was elected to serve” [sic].
In fact, what the White House appears to be doing is stripping the capacity of time-honoured, fact-based journalists to serve as the eyes and ears of the American public, and replacing them with men and women like Glenn, whose political sympathies lie directly with Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement.
Already stung by the administration’s ban of the Associated Press over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s new moniker, the Gulf of America, Washington reporters reacted to Leavitt’s move with fury. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States”, thundered the WHCA. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president”.
Peter Baker, the award-winning correspondent at The New York Times who previously served as the newspaper’s Moscow Correspondent, cited parallels with the Kremlin’s media management under President Vladimir Putin. “The Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access”, he wrote on social media. “The message is clear. Given that the White House has already kicked one news organisation out of the pool because of coverage is does not like, it is making certain everyone else know the rest of us can be barred too if the president does not like our questions or stories”.
Even Fox News, normally a reliable booster of Trump, hit back at the White House decision. “This move does not give power back to the people”, wrote Jacqui Heinrich, the network’s senior White House correspondent who serves on the WHCA board. “It gives power to the White House”.
But Trump supporters welcomed Leavitt’s announcement. Pro-Trump social media influencer Mike Cernovich called the WHCA “a terrible group of mean girls and snobs who gate-kept who could cover Trump”.
In fact, the WHCA plays no role in determining access to the briefing room. Rather, it has organised the weekly composition of press pools based on the resources that various news organisations can bring to the table, reflecting the fact that the major broadcasters, news agencies and newspapers enjoy the finances, capacities and staff not shared by smaller outlets like “Real America’s Voice TV”.
Daily pool reports flood in to the inboxes of reporters, informing us all of the President’s activities, providing detail from events as they happen, and serving as first-hand, first-person accounts of what is taking place as Trump’s day unfolds. The notion that those reports might now be coloured by being generated only by pro-Trump, Maga loyalists will render it impossible for journalists to rely on them, denying the outside world any fact-based reporting from “the room where it happened”.
But that could immediately become the new reality in Washington, where Trump wants his own supportive media to be given front-row seats at the White House, as well as the State Department and the Pentagon. CNN, NBC, National Public Radio, The New York Times and Politico have already been evicted from their offices at the Department of Defence, with the space being handed over to right-leaning outlets including Breitbart News, One America News Network, Newsmax TV and The Daily Caller.
It may not be long before similar moves are made to evict what the White House brands “legacy media” from the warren of tiny offices that lie steps away from the briefing room. It seems likely that a man called Brian will soon be sitting in one of them.
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