It’s just the latest in a long list of freakouts by the liberal inside-the-Beltway establishment about the way the Trump 2.0 administration is shaking up Washington. The decision to change the composition of the White House press pool, however, seems to hit the D.C. elites where it really hurts.
For several decades, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) has jealously guarded its privilege to determine which outlets get the right to work in the executive mansion and sit in the briefing room when press conferences are held and to be recognized to ask questions. So, it’s hardly surprising that this group—whose complaints are amplified by the hysterical coverage of the issue in the corporate mainstream publications and websites where its members work—is treating this measure as if it is the end of the free press, if not the world.
That it is nothing of the kind is only partly why this story says a lot more about the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the establishment press than it does about the foibles and willingness of President Donald Trump and his team to get even with their antagonists. What is going on here is not just a battle between a new administration clearly spoiling for a fight with a liberal press that is hopelessly biased against Trump and will do anything it can to discredit him.
An inflection point
It is also an inflection point in which legacy outlets whose hegemonic dominance of journalism ended long ago are being forced to recognize just that. They are being put on notice that their control of the flow of news at places like the White House will no longer be indulged. What’s more, their glaringly obvious tilt to the left that has grown greater with every passing year, especially since Trump began discomfiting the D.C. uniparty, is also a factor here. It has caused them not just to be challenged by those who disagree with their prejudicial coverage but rendered them essentially irrelevant to a 2024 presidential election, whose discourse was largely conducted via podcasts and niche publications, and not the daily newspapers, broadcast and cable-TV news channels.
This is important not just because it affects the coverage of Trump’s efforts to reform an unelected and heretofore unaccountable administrative state of federal bureaucrats who have more power than most citizens understand. Trump’s putting these D.C. elites in their place should also help draw similar conclusions about the way the same establishment outlets have covered Israel and its war against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists since the terror attacks that killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023.
In the same way, that the members of the WHCA have acted as cheerleaders for the anti-Trump “resistance” since January 2017, much of the media establishment has largely acted as stenographers for Hamas, reporting their lies and propaganda about their genocidal war on the Jewish state as if they were facts. That’s why those who are sick and tired of the corporate press’s bad reporting and twisted analysis of Israel’s struggle against Islamist terror should be cheering the way the administration is seeking to undermine their power and open up the White House to a broad array of outlets.
To the extent that most Americans know anything about the WHCA, they are aware of two things.
One is that its members are the ones who appear on camera and ask questions at White House pressers. The other is that it hosts the annual WHCA Washington dinner, a glitzy televised event known as the “nerd prom.” Its members’ claims to the contrary, the latter has nothing to do with journalism and everything to do with a lame effort on the part of Washington elites to claim the same sort of status that Hollywood movers and shakers take for granted.
Their silly dress-up party could be easily ignored. Still, it matters because in the last decade, the event was an indicator of the way that the WHCA and the corporate press were dropping even the pretense of objectivity when it came to covering politics. The formerly bipartisan spirit that supposedly animated the dinner has given way to bitter partisanship and cruel mockery of Trump and conservatives to the point where the president rightly boycotted the event during his first term and will likely do the same in the future.
A biased press
Even if inclined to forget about that, those who watched the White House pressers in the last two administrations could see bias on display from the press corps. While Trump was in the White House, the journalists who got to ask questions were almost universally hostile, if not ready to drop the pretense that they were there for inquiries, instead actually debating him or his team. While Biden was president, his representatives were only challenged by one member who got to ask questions: Peter Doocy, the intrepid and indefatigable representative of Fox News. He attempted to play the role that everybody in the press used to try to fill as a relentless questioner of the status quo and the administration’s party line of the day.
Outside of him, the WHCA’s members on display in the White House briefing room acted as a tame state-run press corps when Obama and Biden were in the White House, then switched to being cheerleaders for the Democratic opposition when it was Trump who was in power.
What especially undermined their credibility was their willingness to turn a blind eye to Biden’s growing mental incapacity during his four years in the White House.
While no accusation against Trump, including outrageous Russia collusion hoax conspiracy theories, was too far-fetched to be published or broadcast during Trump’s first term, the supposedly tough White House press corps refused to report on Biden’s condition.
They didn’t complain about the way that his staff shielded him from the press and how they had fewer opportunities to question him publicly than any other president since broadcast media was invented. They also denigrated those outlets and journalists who did choose to notice what Americans could see for themselves on those rare occasions when Biden was put in the public eye as publishing “fake news” and “cheap fakes.”
Among those who were the most biased was Politico correspondent Eugene Daniels, who now serves as president of the WHCA and whose loud whining about Trump’s decision has given him his 15 minutes of fame in the last week. Just as egregious is former White House correspondent and current CNN host Jake Tapper. He was among the most vociferous of those who scorched those who questioned Biden’s mental incapacity. But in a show of just how clueless, hypocritical and shameless the Washington press can be, he’s now written a book about the cover-up of Biden’s decline. That’s in spite of the fact that he and his network were among the chief orchestrators and perpetrators of one of the worst scandals in modern political history.
False charges of tyranny
If you only watch CNN or read The New York Times—to take just two of the worst examples of mainstream media bias—you’d think what Trump is doing to the WHCA is akin to one of the purges of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. Indeed, the Times actually described Trump’s actions in a headline as, “a Moscow-like chill.”
Let’s be clear about what Trump has done. His team stripped the WHCA of control of which outlets get into the White House to make it more representative of the contemporary press. Rather than simply trying to institute a right-wing bias, that actually gives podcasts and niche outlets on both the left and the right a better chance than they had before.
The days of the news being a matter of what four middle-aged white men said at 6:30 p.m. EST every evening (as was the case when network news ruled journalism from the 1950s to the 1980s) or what a few leading daily newspaper editors considered worthy of being printed are long over. Like it or not, Americans get their news from their social-media feeds and podcasts, not by watching cable television or reading leading newspapers. Most of them have also learned that those who only read the Times or watch CNN (and thus only absorb what those inside the left-wing bubble want them to know) can be among the least informed people in the country.
Major outlets will largely still be there, though the White House is currently punishing the Associated Press for refusing to use the Trump name change of the “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” That seems petty, but given that the AP’s highly influential style guide remains a dominant force in journalism, it can also be defensible. That guide had become something of a joke for its adoption in recent years of a host of changes to force outlets to employ leftist and woke terminology to conform to the current orthodoxies of critical race theory and gender ideology. Its comeuppance is not Stalinist tyranny but long overdue.
For all the weeping and wailing about the end of press freedom and democracy, no one is being thrown in jail for offending the president. Nor is any outlet being prevented from publishing or broadcasting. The First Amendment right to a free press still flourishes, even as big media declines. What Trump is doing is stripping the establishment of its power to act as gatekeepers and to establish biased narratives.
Doing something about press bias is more important than ever because most of the corporate media is increasingly made up of journalists who have given up the traditional quest for objective truth and instead embraced political activism as their true calling. This sort of thing has long been apparent in the coverage of the Middle East. A new generation of media adopted the false narrative—rooted in the same woke ideologies in which they were indoctrinated while being miseducated at elite universities—about Israel being a “white” oppressor and thus in the wrong no matter what it did, and the Palestinians in the right no matter what they did, including the atrocities of Oct. 7. Rather than being an outlier, literary star Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent travesty about his 10-day trip to “Palestine” offers a window into the mindset of how many journalists now think and work.
To call pushback against this from the White House, the thin edge of the wedge of tyranny is not just ludicrous but a form of gaslighting that the Washington establishment ought not to get away with anymore.
Gatekeepers’ hurt feelings
Far from outraging the country, most Americans don’t care about the WHCA’s hurt feelings any more than they do about federal employees who are no longer guaranteed lifetime employment because of what Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is trying to do or being asked what it is they are doing when collecting their salaries. The only people who are taking the claims that Trump is ending press freedom seriously are the left-wing gatekeepers being ousted and those in their dwindling though still highly influential audiences.
It’s true that you can’t count on the accuracy of every outlet you read on the Internet, whether on the left or the right. But as we’ve learned to our sorrow, the same is true for The New York Times, The Washington Post (though the Post’s editorial page is shifting back to the center due to the belief by its publisher, Jeff Bezos, that left-wing orthodoxy is putting out of touch with most of his Amazon customers), CNN, NPR and so many other establishment outlets that think they should be the only ones determining what Americans read, listen or watch. Trump’s decision is not a form of censorship. That’s what Biden did when he bullied social-media companies and establishment outlets to shut down dissent on pandemic policies and other issues. Few in the WHCA protested that because rather than support free speech and freedom of the press, what they wanted was to shut down opponents. Nor did they make a fuss when Biden lifted the credentials of some in the press pool or when Obama attacked Fox News with just as much vitriol that Trump trolls his critics.
Instead, Trump is merely opening up the White House to a more representative group of media. That is not tyranny, just the end of the reign of liberal establishment gatekeepers. And it’s something that those who truly support press freedom and democracy should applaud rather than lament.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.