Trump Is Stacking the Press Pool With Loyalists and Crushing the Independence of the White House Press Corps
Donald Trump has been trying—and succeeding—in breaking the independence of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA). His goal is to make the reporters who cover the White House entirely dependent on the president’s favor.
CNN has the latest:
In the Trump administration’s latest assertion of power over the press corps, the White House intends to take over the seating assignments in the press briefing room, according to a senior official. …
In February Trump banned The Associated Press, a foundational part of White House coverage for more than one hundred years, from press conferences and other events. Then [White House Press Secretary Karoline] Leavitt said the White House would pick the “press pool” reporters who travel with the president and attend small-scale events with him, thereby stripping the association of its historic role organizing the pool.
In recent weeks, the White House has invited hyperpartisan pro-Trump websites and relatively low-rated TV networks into the pool. …
All of the disruptions have pointed in the same predictable direction: Toward media coverage that supports rather than scrutinizes the administration’s agenda.
This is a violation, not of the law or the Constitution, but of longstanding norms under which the White House respected the independence of the media. But the WHCA decided not to fight to protect the Associated Press, and its reward is that Trump is making it even more irrelevant.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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