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If you had asked me to come up with the most pandering question possible to put to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, I don’t think I could have produced something better than the softball lobbed by Breitbart reporter Matt Boyle at the Trump administration’s first press briefing, in January. “You laid out several of the actions that President Trump has taken,” Boyle said to Leavitt. “Obviously, it’s a stark contrast to the previous administration and a breakneck speed from President Trump. Can we expect that pace to continue?” (“There is no doubt President Trump has always been the hardest-working man in politics,” Leavitt replied. “This president did more in the first hundred hours than the previous president did in the first hundred days.”)
More of this fawning treatment, it seems, is coming soon. Last week, Leavitt announced that the Trump administration would be hand-selecting the outlets participating in the press pool, the group of journalists responsible for conveying information about happenings in the White House to a broader corps of correspondents. The idea behind the system is that space and resources are limited, so a rotating group is designated to report from the briefing room and to follow the president whenever he leaves the White House. For decades, an independent organization called the White House Correspondents’ Association has been responsible for credentialing and coordinating the pool, as well as delineating protocol. “Not anymore,” Leavitt said.
“It’s beyond time that the White House press operation reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025, not 1925,” she added, noting that the goal is including outlets that have been excluded in the past and “restoring power back to the American people, who President Trump was elected to serve.” In the first configuration, the wire service spots usually reserved for journalists from Reuters and the Associated Press were designated for conservative outlets Newsmax and Blaze Media.
Predictably, the announcement was met with outrage. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” WHCA president Eugene Daniels wrote in a statement. One of the primary concerns is that, in curating the press pool, the administration can avoid facing challenging questions that might produce less flattering coverage. And Daniels pushed back against the idea that White House intervention was necessary to reflect a changing media ecosystem. “For generations, the working journalists elected to lead the White House Correspondents’ Association have consistently expanded the WHCA’s membership and its pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.” The editor of Bloomberg News, a wire service that was chosen for the first pool, joined those from the AP and Reuters in issuing a statement: “It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press,” they wrote, adding that reducing the number of represented wire services “harms the spread of reliable information.”
Even some conservative voices expressed alarm. Jacqui Heinrich, a White House correspondent for Fox News (which, of course, generally provides coverage favorable to Trump), wrote on X that “this move does not give the power back to the people—it gives power to the White House.” Conservative political commentator Megyn Kelly said that, though she appreciates the administration’s effort to integrate new outlets, “you need true pros who have got a lot of experience” covering the president. (Many of the outlets brought into the fold by the administration have been criticized for their lack of professionalism and journalistic rigor.)
Since Trump took office six weeks ago, the administration has been not-so-gradually edging toward this most recent edict. At Leavitt’s first briefing as press secretary, she announced that a seat in the briefing room would be reserved for a member of the “new media”—podcasters, influencers, and reporters of the administration’s choosing who have not previously had a seat. In each of the four briefings given by Leavitt since Trump took office, this reporter has been allowed to ask the first question. The administration also reassigned office space in the Pentagon formerly occupied by NPR, NBC, and the New York Times to HuffPost and pro-Trump outlets Breitbart and One America News. Right-wing radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton were invited to broadcast their show from the building. And then the AP was denied entry into White House press events after refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” It sued.
Admittedly, conservative outlets have not been the only ones given increased access by the new administration; on the day of Leavitt’s announcement about the most recent press pool shake-up, Semafor, which has done rigorous reporting since its founding, in 2022, was in the “new media” seat. And to me, the announcement itself does seem at least in part to be a deliberate troll meant to activate the indignation of the “legacy media”—and activate it did!—though this is not to say that this most recent step toward authoritarianism will not have real-world consequences.
Still, I think that one of the biggest dangers of the press pool takeover is that it brings the administration one step closer to convincing the public that an adversarial press is an obstacle to effective governance. Trump’s message remains that opposition is the root of inefficiency, and inefficiency is the hallmark of an outdated and oppressive political establishment. The media’s scrutiny may well slow the pace of reform—both the reckless kind and the good and necessary kind. Still, flattery has no place in the briefing room. Hard questions may be an inconvenience, but that’s exactly the point.
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