Reuters and HuffPost were removed from the White House press pool on Wednesday — a move that came on the first day the Trump Administration’s press team took control away from the White House Correspondents’ Association, which typically determines the pool.
The Associated Press — which has been indefinitely banned by the Trump press team from the Oval Office and other presidential spaces — was also excluded from the pool. The Trump-AP feud stems from the outlet’s continued use of the term “Gulf of Mexico,” rather than calling it “Gulf of America,” following President Trump’s executive order in January renaming the gulf on government contracts.
Reuters, the AP, and Bloomberg — the three outlets that are permanent wires for the White House pool — issued a joint statement on the Trump media team’s decision on Wednesday.
“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press,” the statement said. “We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the president threatens that principle.”
The outlets added: “It also harms the spread of reliable information to people, communities, businesses and global financial markets that heavily depend on our reporting.”
The Wednesday pool included two right-leaning outlets, Newsmax and The Blaze; Newsmax was listed as the “secondary TV Correspondents and Crew” and The Blaze was granted the “New Media” position. Bloomberg was the lone wire service, and Reuters was included as one of the three outlets taking photos, alongside AFP and the New York Times. ABC was the main TV channel, NPR was the radio outlet and Axios was the print outlet.
On Tuesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump Administration’s media team would now determine which outlets are part of the White House press pool — a decision that ripped control away from the WHCA.
“For decades, a group of D.C.-based journalists — the White House Correspondents Association — has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the President of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore,” Leavitt said during her Tuesday press briefing.
“I am proud to announce that we are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows and who listen to your radio stations. Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team.”
The press secretary also indicated that journalistic outlets will continue being rotated in and out of the press pool.
That decision was skewered by a number of mainstream journalists, including Peter Baker of the New York Times and his wife, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, who both compared it to a “Kremlin” press pool.
