The White House Press Corpse
Is President Donald Trump a "unique" threat to freedom of the press or not a threat at all? I call neither.
The role of a free press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. —Seymour Hersh, Reporter
“From the moment Trump returned to office, his second administration has prioritized giving access and status to an array of far-right influencers and news outlets, including figures with checkered pasts and thin or nonexistent journalistic credentials. In doing so the administration has created a swell of flattering media coverage,” wrote Anna Merlan in Mother Jones, “a gauzy bubble around its every decision, no matter how destructive or incoherent.”
“For the most part, this new crop of people who have been given extremely good access are not journalists in the traditional sense,” says Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and a former public editor for the New York Times.
“They’re closer to propagandists than journalists,” Sullivan adds. “I don’t know if you could call it ‘coverage.’ It’s positive exposure for the Trump administration. They’ll be part of a cheering squad.”
Editor of HuffPost, once a glorified clickbait publication, now one of the publications sidelined from White House press pool, says, “the White House must stop this cowardly behavior and restore HuffPost’s place in the press pool immediately.”
The WHCA expressed concern that the White House's new control might benefit friendly news outlets and compromise press independence.
“Last week, 40 news organizations signed a joint letter to the White House in support of The Associated Press. Even some conservative outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax, urged the White House to restore the AP’s access. Newsmax released a statement, saying, “We can understand President Trump’s frustration because the media has often been unfair to him, but Newsmax supports the AP’s right, as a private organization, to use the language it wants to use in its reporting.”
Oliver Darcy of Status News first reported on the “confidential” letter and the two traditionally pro-Trump outlets’ inclusion. “The First Amendment prohibits the government from asserting control over how news organizations make editorial decisions. Any attempt to punish journalists for those decisions is a serious breach of this Constitutional protection,” the letter reads, according to Darcy’s report.
So, which is it? These “friendly” publications and propagandists are afraid to pushback for fear of being kicked out of the pool, or they’re willing to pushback on being allowed in the “pool?”
Are they given access as “part of the cheering squad?” Or are you all upset because you no longer have a monopoly on the “press pool,” and the unmonopolized media are kicking your ass!
You no longer get to say who gets press credentials, or who gets to ask questions and how many they get to ask. I’m sure it sucks to be on your side right now, but the last four years were the same on the other side of the aisle. In the meantime, how about growing a pair and being a real journalist and not taking “no” for an answer. Go undercover. If Steven Crowder can pull it off surely the AP can!
, in order to get his Pulitzer Prize winning “My Lai Massacre” story or his famous expose of the “CIA’s Illegal Domestic Spying” he had to have a trick or two up his sleeve. That would be much more respectable than screeching about censorship, after you laughed in all of our faces when we showed you all proof of a government censorship apparatus that targets either side of the aisle depending on who is opposing the “approved narrative.”Here’s Hersh referring to how little the White House Press Corps cared about the CIA under Nixon spying on American citizens:
Since few, if any, in the Washington press corps seemed to be interested in adding to my domestic spying account, I did not take my family on a New Year’s holiday. I instead pounded out story after story over the next month with the goal—never stated, of course—of ensuring that Alan Cranston and his colleagues in the Senate would agree to set up a special investigating committee to look into CIA abuses.
And during Vietnam talks:
It was malarkey and I remember wondering how Kissinger had managed to get away with such fulsome flattery with the White House press corps. I thought the reporters assigned to that beat were at the top of the game and could not be as easy to please as was the Pentagon press corps in my days there. I was wrong and Kissinger was right.
And during the Obama Administration after the “Killing of Osama Bin Laden” which Seymour Hersh wrote a book telling the actual story of how it went down:
The story got a good deal of attention, but I was not surprised by the refusal, or the inability, of the press to follow up on the vital aspect of my story—the double cross of Pakistan. The media focused, as I feared would happen, not on what I wrote but on why it wasn’t in The New Yorker. The possibility that two dozen navy SEALs could escape observation and get to bin Laden without some help from the Pakistani military and intelligence communities was nil, but the White House press corps bought the story. Twenty-four-hour cable news was devouring the news-reporting business, TV panelist by TV panelist.
“The White House takeover of the press pool is a brazen attack on the First Amendment. The Trump administration is overturning a century-old system that guarantees equal access to the news media.”
Tuesday, asserting that the White House Correspondents’ Association “should no longer have a monopoly” on organizing press pools and that the White House would determine the makeup of the pool on a day-to-day Press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the newest changes in the briefing room on basis.
“All journalists, outlets and voices deserve a seat at this highly coveted table,” Leavitt said.
WHCA, a group of journalists on the beat elected by their peers, have long overseen the rotations of print, radio and television correspondents that make up the pool, a 13-member group of journalists allowed access to the president in smaller settings.
“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” said Eugene Daniels, the president of WHCA’s board and a POLITICO correspondent. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
For many years the press has worked as the propaganda arm of whoever was in charge. It has been this way, maybe since the 90’s. This is the same reason that in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the propagandists that cheered it on, confirming every lie—and false intelligence briefing—got promotions, while those who rightfully dissented and called it out for what it really was got severance packages, and a ticket to “Never work in this town again!”
Much further than the 90’s, here’s an excerpt of an article by I.F. Stone, in his book “The Haunted Fifties 1953-1963” part of his series of books A Nonconformist History of our Times on November 15th, 1955:
The third obstacle is that this has always been and is now more than ever a conformist country. It doesn’t take much deviation from Rotary Club norms in the average American community to get oneself set down as queer, radical, and unreliable.
Against this background, it is easy to see why the average Washing ton correspondent is content to write what he is spoon-feed by the government’s press officers. Especially since the press is largely Republican and this is a Republican Administration, there is little market for “exposing” the government. Why dig up a story which the desk back home will spike?
It seems the only difference in ‘55 is back then he was putting the blame on the editors aligning with the government, now it’s the journalists too. When there is a Democrat Administration the press pool is primarily democrat, when there is a Republican Administration the press pool is primarily Republican. And after every election, a realignment occurs.
Stone continues:
It was this astringent view of our profession and its circumstances which I found lacking in the newspaperman’s testimony which opened the investigation launched here by a special House subcommittee on government “information.” The most perceptive of the witnesses, and one of our very best reporters, James Reston of the New York Times, put his finger on the vital point when he said that worse than suppression was the “managing” of the news by government departments. But the news is “managed” because the reporters and their editors let themselves be managed.
And that last bit is truer now more than ever. Continuing:
The State Department is an outstanding offender. Very often, for example, newspaper readers get not so much what actually happened at the UN as the “slant” given out in the corridors afterward to the reporters by a State Department attaché.
The private dinner, the special taping, are all devices for “managing” the news, as are the special organizations of privileged citizens gathered in by the State and Defense Departments for those sessions at which highly confidential (and one-sided) information is ladled out to a flattered “elite.”
As a reporter who began by covering small towns, where one has to dig for the news, I can testify that Washington is in many ways one of the easiest cities in the world to cover. The problem is the abundance of riches. It is true that the Government, like every other government in the world, does its best to distort the news in its favor—but that only makes the job more interesting.
Most of my colleagues agree with the Government and write the accepted thing because that is what they believe; they are indeed—with honorable exceptions—as suspicious of the non-conformist as any group in Kiwanis.
This comes back to a theme I constantly rail on about. That being, when the government is working well it is oppressive. In this case, the government working as a “well-oiled” machine is perfect “management” of the news. Meaning we only find out what they want us to find out.
The New York Post asks, “Where was the WHCA when the Obama administration was spying on then-Fox reporter James Rosen’s email and phone records?”
It acts like a cartel, ridiculing and ostracizing conservative voices Remember Chanel Rion from OANN?
The WHCA tried to banish her from the White House.
She had to bring her own folding deck chair and sit in the back of the briefing room.
Or Simon Ateba, the African journalist who ran afoul of Biden’s hopeless press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre?
The group rescinded his membership and would not even let him buy a ticket to its annual partisan dinner, where WHCA officeholders canoodled repulsively onstage with Biden and Kamala Harris.
In Trump’s first term, by contrast, the WHCA invited a nasty comedian to trash the appearance of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his then-press secretary.
Each administration, maybe throughout the last century, made it their business to keep a tight watch on the press pool. Freedom of the press, in the Western Hemisphere, isn’t nearly as free as we’d like to pretend.
Each Administration makes it less free than the one before, wanna see how the last administration treated the press? Hit play below.
The journalist was
. A world-renowned journalist who’s dedicated his life to the principle of “Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”How about in the Obama Administration? Have you seen the video that was leaked to Julian Assange called ‘Collateral Murder?’ (Video Below-At Own Risk)
George W. Bush once said that he considers “the media to be indispensable to democracy. We needed the media to hold people like me to account.” But we all know how well that turned out. We murdered a million people in a country that was fully compliant with all guardrails put up to keep Saddam’s regime from producing “weapons of mass destruction” on the grounds that they were now producing weapons of mass destruction. They were not. And the media, on both sides, cheered on these murders, and the Bush administration didn’t need to keep “unfriendly” media out, the MEDIA kept “unfriendly” media out.
So, is the Trump administration banning “unfriendly” media from the White House? Probably. Like every administration before.
It would seem, if you heard it from HuffPost, or MSNBC, or the Associated Press, or from the “friendly” media like Newsmax, that they’d locked AP journalists in Stalin’s Gulag, but they simply replaced the AP with Axios, a fellow “unfriendly” news source.
This is after the Associated Press, or AP, had a monopoly on the press pool for many years in the past. They would choose who gets to ask questions, the seating arrangement, based on who has more reach, always “televised in the front” while the now, more popular, internet journalists were stuffed in the back where they would never get called on for their questions, leaving them to do things like this:
In 2023, more than 440 reporters lost press credentials after President Joe Biden’s White House modified its rules for eligibility for permanent passes.
Credentialed White House press members dropped from 1,417 members to 975 members after the White House unveiled new standards requiring an annual renewal of hard passes, Politico reported in 2023. Journalists without hard passes were still authorized to apply for day passes to the White House.
The Biden White House policy was launched in May 2023 and required reporters to prove employment with "an organization whose principal business is news dissemination" and show that they have "accessed the White House campus at least once during the prior six months for work, or have proof of employment within the last three months to cover the White House.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
But Congress didn’t make a law restricting the freedom of speech, and neither did the Donald Trump White House. It’s his right as president to say who comes in the White House. This is why, when Fredrik Douglas, the former slave, and first black person to enter the White House, even though many didn’t want him to come in, the President let him in anyways, and many presidents up until recent times didn’t let another black person in. Controversial? Yes, but his choice nevertheless.
recently commented, “People are claiming the White House is bullying the AP, repeating the saw that Trump is telling them “what words to use.” If you don’t see the irony, you’ve never used the AP stylebook.”
I must admit, that in all the chaos I forgot that we’re talking about the same AP. They literally have a book, used internationally, that tell you “What words to use in journalism.” I used it, a lot more in my earlier writing, but because I’m not a journalism major, in fact the only degree I have is being an avid reader, and I received honors recognition for writing and language arts when I gave up on public school and took the GED. So, I did thumb through the AP Stylebook just to get down the format of journalism, however, I kinda do my own thing now.
Now, it’s still too early to tell about the Trump 2.0 Administration, but so far, they’ve taken part in the least censorship of any administration in my lifetime. The Biden Administration was the most censorious regime, however, since the Gilded Age, and the publications and outlets now yelling about censorship are the same outlets that said
was a “non-story” and laughed when the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s famous laptop was limited on all platforms. Done at the governments behest by an NGO that was created and funded by Congress. If that’s not censorship, the AP, whose ran a monopoly on language for decades, losing their precious little “press pass,” definitely isn’t censorship.I’m happy more views are finally making it into the White House, and if the AP has to take the hit for that to happen, then off with their heads!
Thank you for reading. This is
, Editor-in-Chief,