WHCA Loses Gatekeeping Role

Could a Trump press pool really be any worse than the WHCA press pool?

This is the kind of “independent” press pool that the WHCA allowed to exist.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House Correspondents Association would no longer be allowed to act as the gate keeper to participation in the White House press pool, something that it has done since the Eisenhower administration. Predictably, this move has produced fits among the would-be gate keepers, with the narrative being that Trump is, as CNN put it, now “deciding who can cover the president”. The WHCA itself issued a statement that “This move tears at the independence of a free press” and that “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president”. We shouldn’t be surprised that those who currently control the process will be outraged at losing their power to do so, but we also shouldn’t buy into their narrative.

First, it is important to understand what the WH press pool is. The WH press pool exists because space constraints often make it impossible to accommodate everyone who might want to cover an event involving the president. As explained by the WHCA itself:

The Oval Office can’t possibly fit every reporter and photographer who’d like to be there when the president invites the press to witness a bill signing or meeting with a foreign leader. Same with the Roosevelt Room and other venues at the White House complex.

So, the pool system evolved to allow a limited number of people to represent the full press corps. On campus at the White House, that’s typically a group of 20 correspondents from wire services, print outlets, TV and radio, along with photojournalists and sound operators.

The print reporter on duty that day files “pool reports” that get distributed by email to the White House press corps and a much larger list controlled by the White House Press Office.

The press pool also travels with the president, so that it can report on what he says and does outside of the White House, as well as on any unexpected circumstances that might arise revolving around the president. For example, the reason we have footage and pictures of President Reagan getting shot in 1981 is because the press pool was travelling with him as he left the Washington Hilton following a speaking engagement. Just like trying to fit them all into the Oval Office, obviously it would be logistically impossible for the hundreds of reporters who cover the White House for various outlets and platforms to be following the President from place to place, and so the limited press pool performs that duty on behalf of all reporters.

Another thing to note about the WH press pool is that, contrary to the notion that these reporters are heroically defending the public’s right to know, it exists largely as a public relations tool for the president himself . The reason the press pool is invited into the Oval Office to report on Trump signing a bunch of Executive Orders is because Trump wants them to report it and wants pictures of it to be published. If he didn’t, he would just sign them in private. There is no law requiring the president hold signing ceremonies, or any other ceremony, for the benefit of the press and public. The reporters are not reporting anything that the president himself doesn’t want the public to know. Outside of being on hand for unexpected events such as the previously mentioned Reagan assassination attempt, the only chance that press pool reporters have to discover anything new or to actually break news is when the president takes questions from them.

And this seems to be the heart of the issue. The WHCA along with the rest of the establishment legacy media objects to the idea that the White House itself might be in the position of cherry picking friendly reporters to be in the daily press pool, meaning the president will never face challenging questions. And, at least theoretically, this is a perfectly reasonable objection. But there are several realities that ought to temper this seemingly reasonable objection.

First, the primary setting in which a president takes questions from the media is in formal press conferences, which are not limited to just the press pool. So even if the WH press pool was comprised of primarily reporters friendly to the president, that wouldn’t change the dynamic of formal press conferences, and he’d still be subject to hostile questioning within that setting. Also, as far as I can tell, the rules governing the daily press briefing with the President’s press secretary, which are also established by the WHCA, remain unchanged.

Second, the president is under no obligation to answer questions from the press pool. If he wants, he can simply ignore their shouted questions, as evidenced by President Biden over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. So even with a press pool packed with friendly reporters - which arguably was the case for Biden even with the WHCA doing the picking (see below) - it isn’t like president is avoiding something that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to avoid.

And at least with regard to Trump, it seems highly unlikely that he would want to avoid hostile questions anyway. Trump seems to revel in taking on the opposition press, and he loves to take media questions. In the first month of this second term, Trump faced more than 1,000 questions from the media. To put that into perspective, according to the National Journal, Trump answered more media questions (164) in his first 3 days than either Obama (161) or Biden (141) answered in their first month. Answering questions from the media is not something we seem to need to be worried about with Trump. While I can imagine he might withhold press pool duties from a particular reporter or outlet as part of a grudge, it doesn’t seem probable that he would eliminate hostile outlets entirely. Not only doesn’t it seem probable, given that 90% of the media is hostile to him, it doesn’t even seem possible.

Lastly, and at least ostensibly, according to Leavitt the motivation for the change in press pool policy is actually to increase, not decrease, the pool of reporters allowed to do press pool duties. Legacy outlets such as the New York Times, Reuters, and even the BBC, none of which are “friendly” to a Trump administration (to say the very least!), will supposedly remain on the rotation, but new outlets that were previously prevented from being part of the pool by the WHCA will now enjoy the same access that those legacy outlets get. Whether this proves to be the case, we shall see, but the very first action taken by the White House as part of this new policy was to replace a Huffington Post reporter that was scheduled to be part of the Wednesday press pool with a reporter from Axios, hardly a hotbed of MAGA supporting reporters.

All that being said, even if one still believes that it is a bad idea to allow the White House to pick who will make up the press pool, it doesn’t follow that allowing the WHCA to continue to do it is a good or even a marginally better one. Consider its track record over the last 4 years. Apart from the White House staff and his own family, the pool reporters selected by the WHCA had what is probably the closest and most extensive daily access to President Biden of any other group of people, yet, either out of sheer occupational incompetence or a deliberate desire to deceive their audience, at no point did they ever report on the now undeniable cognitive decline that Biden was enduring throughout his 4 year term. How is it that the WHCA, which defines its mission as existing “to ensure robust news coverage of the president and the presidency,” allowed that to happen?

Or consider the fact that when, in 2023, the Biden administration reduced the number of reporters with access to the White House by over 30%, removing White House passes from 442 previously credentialed reporters, the response of the WHCA was not outrage that the White House was trying to decide who could and could not cover the president. Its response was, instead, to “take an officially noncommittal stance”. The WHCA is not the defender of White House access that it pretends to be.

And the idea that the WHCA might now be concerned about the White House choosing for itself who will get to question the president is especially ironic given that, on the rare occasions that President Biden did take questions from the WHCA-selected press pool, not only were the reporters pre-selected by Biden’s staff to be allowed to ask questions, but even the questions were pre-screened so that Biden would know what was coming and have prepared answers. It seems the Biden White House didn’t need to get involved in making sure the press pool was staffed with friendly reporters primarily because the WHCA was already doing the job for it. And it now has the nerve to break out the fainting couches over the prospect of losing that power to a Trump White House? Spare me.

In any event, regardless of how the Trump White House might manage the press pool rotation, the narrative that it is choosing which reporters will “cover” the president is just nonsense. The press pool is not the sole, or even the primary, means by which the president is “covered” by reporters. On the front page of today’s New York Times, there are 4 stories with “Trump” in the headlines. Only one of them was centered on information that would have come from the WH press pool, an article about comments Trump made during his first cabinet meeting. The other three articles - one about a Trump plan to save the car industry from California regulations, one about Trump’s “intense interest in Ukraine’s minerals”, and one about Trump’s alleged designs for the Postal Service - came from actual, original reporting, not from simply regurgitating what the press pool representative reported that day. “Coverage” of the president involves a lot more than simply going to choreographed events and recording what the president said or did, and there is virtually no doubt whatsoever that the coverage of Trump, whether by the NYT or the WaPo or CNN or CBS or the BBC, will not change one iota in the absence of the WHCA managing the press pool rotation. To suggest that, in managing the makeup of the press pool, the White House is “deciding who can cover the president”, or as the NYT’s Peter Baker whined, that it is reminiscent of Putin’s early years running Russia, is just absurd hyperbole. Don’t listen to these self-interested partisans. Their credibility on these issues is equivalent to Blutarsky’s grade point average.