The Trump White Home had already removed the Related Press from its press occasions and commandeered the decision-making course of surrounding which reporters be a part of the president’s “press pool.” Now apparently, Trump officers are planning to reshuffle the seating chart within the White Home briefing room too, in keeping with Axios.
That will sound like a small factor, and in some methods it’s. Deciding who sits the place within the briefing room has lengthy been throughout the purview of the White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation, a journalist-led group. In idea, snagging one of many front-row seats that at present go to among the largest broadcasters and newspapers provides reporters a greater likelihood of getting a query in throughout a press briefing. However in a White Home already so overtly hostile to the mainstream media—a White Home that has used the briefing room to accuse journalists of being propagandists—these seats have diminishing returns.
The difficulty will not be a lot how the seating chart will affect this White Home’s press briefings, which largely make information lately for the extent of their obfuscations. However, in assuming energy over a system that has historically been the area of the free press, President Donald Trump is sending a message about who’s actually in command of how his presidency will get coated and who will get to cowl it.
In fact, that message is already unmistakably clear. The Related Press is at present locked in a authorized battle with the White Home after being banned from occasions for refusing to vary the identify of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” In the meantime, earlier than taking workplace, the president filed a flurry of lawsuits in opposition to ABC, CBS, and The Des Moines Register, based mostly on what consultants argue are meritless claims that fly within the face of the First Modification however have prompted many main information organizations to blink all the identical.
The transfer is also an additional blow to the WHCA itself, which was already stripped of certainly one of its main duties in figuring out who will get to hitch the press pool. When the White Home made that change in February, the group’s president Eugene Daniels, said that the transfer “tears on the independence of a free press in the US.”
In a statement Monday concerning the potential seating shuffle, the WHCA board inspired the administration to “abandon this wrong-headed effort,” writing, “If the White Home pushes ahead, it’s going to develop into much more clear that the administration is searching for to cynically seize management of the system by way of which the unbiased press organizes itself, in order that it’s simpler to precise punishment on retailers over their protection.”
It’s little surprise then that WHCA leaders aren’t within the temper to make gentle of the present local weather at their upcoming dinner. Over the weekend, the group canceled scheduled plans to have comic Amber Ruffin headline the occasion after a White Home official surfaced a clip of Ruffin describing the Trump administration as “type of a bunch of murderers.” In an announcement saying the change, Daniels mentioned, “At this consequential second for journalism, I wish to guarantee the main focus will not be on the politics of division, however totally on awarding our colleagues for his or her excellent work and offering scholarship and mentorship to the following technology of journalists.”
