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From its semiformal beginning, in the late 1930s, the White House press pool solved a basic problem of physics: How could a lot of reporters have access to the president’s words and images when only a few of them could fit into the room he was occupying? The answer was by sharing. Ten reporters took notes on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s remarks in the White House on November 23, 1937; they then read them to a stenographer, who distributed a transcript to the wider press corps, according to historian Martha Joynt Kumar. The idea that a designated “pool” journalist could serve as the eyes and ears of many has been in use more or less ever since.
For decades, pool members have been chosen by an independent organization, the White House Correspondents’ Association. Drawing from a list of volunteers, the WHCA organizes the print, audio, and TV pools that tail the president when he travels or speaks inside the White House. The White House hasn’t had a direct role, other than distributing the print pool’s periodic reports to thousands of recipients from a central email account. This noninvolvement was by design; it left reporters free to make their own decisions about who was qualified to report.
The Trump White House now wants to blow all that up. On Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt stunned reporters by announcing that the administration intended to wrest control of the pool from the WHCA. Henceforth, she said, the White House’s press staff would offer pool slots to “well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility.”
Leavitt moved swiftly to implement the White House’s new vision on Wednesday, bumping pool mainstay Reuters from the daily rotation and replacing the news service with representatives from two pro-Trump outlets, Blaze Media and Newsmax. The White House also booted liberal-leaning HuffPost, replacing it with a reporter from Axios. The moves confirmed the fears of mainstream reporters, who say the White House’s intent is to undermine independent reporting by making the pools more MAGA-friendly. While Leavitt hasn’t ruled out including “legacy” outlets from future pools, the plan appears to be to increase the presence of partisans willing to lob softball questions at Trump. Conversely, White House control of the pool’s composition gives it the power to exclude reporters or news organizations the administration dislikes.
“Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s regime, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access,” New York Times correspondent Peter Baker, who has covered every president since Bill Clinton, wrote on X in reaction to Leavitt’s announcement. Trump, he wrote, is ensuring that reporters can be barred “if the president does not like our questions or stories.”
None of these concerns is theoretical, of course. Trump earlier this month barred the Associated Press from the pool as punishment for not referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name Trump prefers, the Gulf of America (AP has sued over the matter; its suit is pending). At the same time, Leavitt introduced a “new media seat” at White House briefings, reserving it primarily for right-wing news influencers whom Leavitt has called on to ask the first question during each session. The effort to steer press questioning into friendly territory was evident at Monday’s press conference with French president Emmanuel Macron; Trump directed the first question to Brian Glenn, a correspondent for the conservative Real America’s Voice network. Glenn (who is dating Trump ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.) asked Trump to comment on a new poll showing that his approval rating remains high.
The White House’s efforts to diminish established news organizations have elicited a series of increasingly alarmed statements from the WHCA, which was organized in 1914 to lobby for increased access to the president (and has been an IRS-recognized nonprofit since 2004). Leavitt’s pool plan “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” the WHCA’s president, Eugene Daniels of Politico, said in a statement on Tuesday. Echoing Baker, he added, “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
Pool duty is generally coveted among White House reporters, given that “it’s the primary way to get interaction with the president,” as one White House correspondent and former WHCA president told me on Tuesday. On most days, the designated pooler produces something newsworthy—a presidential quote, an aside, a bit of color that can enliven another reporter’s story. Pool reporting is especially critical in moments of crisis. Westinghouse Radio correspondent Sid Davis, the radio pooler when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, produced audio accounts of the event and was an eyewitness to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in on Air Force One. Poolers had the first word about assassination attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan, too. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ABC News correspondent Ann Compton filed continual pool reports for more than ten hours as she accompanied President George W. Bush across the country on Air Force One.
Under the present system, members of the WHCA can volunteer to be part of the pool, taking turns in a rotation (thirty-one organizations are currently in the print/digital rotation, ten are in the audio/radio rotation, and the five major networks form the TV pool). Reporters on pool duty commit for the entire day, which can stretch from early morning to late at night. They’re also on call on weekends and holidays.
Much of the time not much happens; poolers often spend hours waiting in “holds” for the president to speak or show up at an event. But when he does, speed is a necessity: print poolers usually file multiple times per day, sometimes seconds after the president speaks. Sharp elbows help, too. Poolers have to negotiate tight spaces with one another, avoiding boom mics and cameras. “It’s not a lot of fun,” National Journal reporter George Condon told me on Tuesday. “You’re not in the pool to be a tourist.” (Condon, a former WHCA president, is working on a book about the history of the organization.)
Getting the hang of pool duty can take some time; new reporters often work their way up through a farm system of sorts, starting in a “supplemental” pool that follows the first lady, second lady, or vice president before being ready for presidential duty.
The rules of pool coverage are relatively simple: report what you see and hear, get the quotes right, and don’t hold anything back. It’s considered bad form for a pool reporter to withhold information from the group for use in his or her own story (reporters still have to do their day jobs while on pool duty). But such hoarding is rare. During his tenure as WHCA president, Condon recalled only one occasion when he had to warn a pool reporter for failing to share information.
Participating in the travel pool can also be an expensive undertaking. Pool reporters (or rather their employers) pay for their own airfare (at Air Force One rates), hotels (wherever the president stays), ground transportation, and food. The costs for even a modest domestic trip can easily approach five figures; a multi-destination presidential trip abroad can cost many times that.
At a time when even the largest news organizations are paring staff and cutting expenses, some White House reporters are skeptical that many of the small, right-wing news outlets friendly to President Trump are willing to bear the cost and commitment that pool duty entails.
So—everyone in the pool? The White House may think it’s a way to expand the field. The practical realities may work against it.
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