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As the outrage about President Trump’s ban on the Associated Press spilled out last week, some journalists urged the press corps to vote with their feet. A press boycott of the daily White House briefing, they said, would be the strongest possible rebuke of the president’s decision to bar AP reporters and photographers from the Oval Office and Air Force One over the news service’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by the name Trump prefers.
Former CNN anchor and White House reporter Jim Acosta (who was himself temporarily banned by Trump in 2018) exhorted reporters to stop covering briefings and presidential trips “until Trump backs down.” Ron Fournier, the AP’s former Washington bureau chief, wrote on X that “no self-respecting journalist should attend a White House briefing while the White House bans the @AP for not accepting state-mandated language.” Fournier later wrote that news organizations condemning Trump’s action “were bringing nothing more to the fight than words.”
There’s no dispute among journalists that Trump’s action is vindictive and possibly illegal, part of a long-jagged campaign of vilifying mainstream news organizations. It’s also hard to find a more blameless victim than the AP, the nonprofit news cooperative that has served up straight news to news outlets for nearly 179 years. The Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America issue seems like a petty pretext for pushing around the press and surely is the first dispute in presidential history over a single word.
A mass boycott of the briefings in protest, however, seems not just unlikely but also unworkable and unwise. Unworkable because “the press” isn’t a single unified entity that marches on command. Journalists on the White House beat are an eclectic collection of individuals, representing news organizations with different perspectives and agendas. The mainstream or “legacy” press—the organizations that most people associate with the phrase “White House press corps”—is just one component. On any given day, the White House briefing room is crawling with independent bloggers, columnists, news “influencers,” reporters from foreign outlets, and an entire ideological cadre devoted to promoting Trump’s agenda, such as Breitbart, One America News Network, and Newsmax. The notion that this motley group would somehow agree on a collective response is absurd. Any boycott that doesn’t include the pro-Trump faction would be ineffective, said Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, because Trump would be “just getting the tears of his victims.”
While the White House Correspondents’ Association has periodically complained about restrictions on access to the president, it’s worth noting that there has never been a walkout. The most extreme confrontation may have occurred in 2009, when the bureau chiefs of the leading TV networks jointly threatened to withdraw pool coverage of an interview with an official if the Obama administration went through with plans to punish Fox News by excluding it from the pool. The White House backed off. Such examples are rare; boycotts are unknown.
A boycott is unwise because the briefings, for all their flaws, are often newsworthy. Every White House views the briefings as an opportunity to spin and to promote the president’s agenda and decisions. In the Trump era, this often lapses into outright misinformation and lies. But that’s exactly why the briefings are valuable, and why it’s a mistake not to be in the room where it’s happening. Journalists are the check on raw, unfiltered spin; they add value by providing current and historical context and by adding facts to whatever one-sided and self-serving information flows from the podium. That’s not stenography. That’s the essence of journalism.
It’s true, as Fournier suggests, that there are other ways to report on the president, and some of them may be better and more illuminating than the daily briefing. But outside of the president himself, the briefings are the most basic statements of the administration’s intent. The press secretary’s statements are on the record, in public, accessible to all. If the press secretary is spinning daily tall tales, this is the chance for reporters to point them out.
At their core, the briefings exist because television news needs them, and the president needs television. The press secretary’s daily Q-and-A with reporters provides the ingredient essential to TV news—a visual record. A clip of CNN’s Kaitlan Collins or NBC’s Peter Alexander asking a challenging question is highly likely to make it to CNN or NBC’s nightly newscast. Even in an age of multiple video sources, millions of Americans will see those clips. Would those viewers know about Trump’s tariff proposals or his vague plans for Gaza without those bits of footage? They might, but in far less immediate, succinct, and understandable ways.
To understand the value of the briefings, it’s instructive to look at Trump’s own attempts to manipulate them. During his first term, in an earlier fit of pique at the news media, Trump suspended the daily briefing for more than a year; his third press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, never gave one, a remarkable distinction for a modern press secretary. Instead, Grisham gave interviews to outlets like Fox News, which could be trusted not to press her too hard. The result arguably suited Trump. It enabled him to advance his talking points without many questions being raised, certainly not by reporters firing questions at him or his press secretary.
Conversely, the restoration of briefings at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, changed the balance in favor of the news media and public information in general. Trump thought holding daily press conferences would reassure a panicky public, demonstrate his command of the situation, and thus pave his way to reelection. Instead, they exposed and amplified Trump’s unpreparedness and ignorance. Trump suggested that the virus would simply disappear with warmer weather; that injecting “disinfectant” and shining “a light inside the body” might be beneficial; that unproven drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could be effective. These daily public statements also later demonstrated what Trump wasn’t saying—that he knew (as he told Bob Woodward in a series of interviews) that COVID was far more dangerous than he was letting on in public.
Acosta thinks Trump would be the loser even if just mainstream reporters walked out. “Trump,” he wrote, “may respond by inviting only sycophants and right-wing hacks to chronicle his daily decrees. Fine. Let the American people soak that in—the image of an aspiring autocrat and his servile propagandists.” Yes, some diehard Trump haters might see it that way. But Americans’ sympathy for reporters isn’t deep, and their attention spans aren’t long. Would the nation’s sympathy remain with boycotting reporters for more than a few days, or even a few hours?
As a practical matter, people might not even notice a boycott. The White House has said it has received eleven thousand new applications for press credentials, meaning any empty seats would be filled quickly. “You need people in that room to keep asking salient questions,” journalist Brian Karem told me. “If the real reporters walk out in protest, you’re just going to be left with people who adore or worship him. It’s a dumb idea.” (Karem, like Acosta, was banned from the White House during Trump’s first term before a court restored his access.)
As Trump escalates his attacks on the press, it pays to remember Martin Baron’s famous dictum. After the Washington Post endured Trump’s repeated broadsides at the start of his first term, in 2017, Baron, the Post’s editor from 2012 to 2021, responded with equanimity. “The way I view it is, we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work,” he said. “We’re doing our jobs.”
That’s the right call. Reporters, do your job.
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