The Trump administration said Tuesday that it would no longer reserve a regular slot in the presidential press pool for three independent newswires that have participated for decades, including The Associated Press.
The move is the latest effort by the White House to exert more control over the dedicated press corps that reports on its day-to-day activities. It was also a new wrinkle in an unfolding legal battle with the AP, whose journalists have been barred for the past two months from covering small-scale events with the president.
A federal judge said last week that the White House had to restore full access to AP journalists, ruling that the administration’s ban amounted to a violation of the First Amendment. The White House has appealed, and a hearing is set for Thursday.
The presidential press pool is a small, rotating group of reporters who are granted access to more intimate events with the president, such as Oval Office receptions, and relay the proceedings to other journalists and the broader public. It is a logistical accommodation for smaller spaces that cannot fit dozens of reporters, and an opportunity for journalists to interact up close with the president and ask him direct questions.
In February, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent, the administration said it would begin handpicking the members of the pool, wresting control from the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, which decried the move. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the group said at the time.
On Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, released a more specific set of guidelines for the press pool, including the elimination of a slot reserved for journalists representing one of three major newswires: the AP, Bloomberg News and Reuters. (Newswires distribute syndicated news articles, videos and photographs to thousands of other media outlets around the United States and the world, many of which cannot afford to employ reporters in Washington.)
That slot, Leavitt said, will instead be filled by an additional journalist from a print media outlet, selected from a rotation of several dozen. Reporters at the three newswires are still eligible to fill the print media slot, but they will no longer be granted access to these sorts of presidential events on a near-daily basis. The change was reported earlier by The New York Post.
“The White House press secretary shall retain day-to-day discretion to determine composition of the pool,” Leavitt said in a memorandum. “This is necessary to ensure that the president’s message reaches targeted audiences and that outlets with applicable subject-matter expertise are present as events warrant.”
Lauren Easton, an AP spokesperson, said in a statement Tuesday that the Trump administration’s actions “continue to disregard the fundamental American freedom to speak without government control or retaliation.”
“We are deeply disappointed that the administration has chosen to restrict the access of all wire services, whose fast and accurate White House coverage informs billions of people every single day, rather than reinstate The Associated Press to the wire pool,” Easton said.
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