Washington: The White House on Wednesday denied reporters from Reuters and other news organizations access to President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting, in line with the administration’s new policy on media coverage. Access was denied to an Associated Press photographer and three reporters from Reuters, HuffPost, and Der Tagesspiegel, a German newspaper.
Meanwhile, TV crews from ABC and Newsmax, along with correspondents from Axios, The Blaze, Bloomberg News, and NPR, were permitted to cover the event. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that the White House would determine which media outlets would cover the president in smaller spaces, such as the Oval Office.
Traditionally, the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has coordinated the rotation of the presidential press pool. Reuters, an international wire service, has been part of this pool for decades. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that while traditional media organizations would continue to cover Trump on a day-to-day basis, the administration plans to change who participates in smaller settings. The pool system, managed by the WHCA, allows select television, radio, wire, print, and photojournalists to cover events and share their reporting with the broader media.
In response to the new policy, the three wire services that have traditionally served as permanent members of the White House pool—the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Reuters—issued a joint statement on Wednesday. The statement emphasized that these organizations "have long worked to ensure that accurate, fair, and timely information about the presidency is communicated to a broad audience of all political persuasions, both in the United States and globally. Much of the White House coverage people see in their local news outlets, wherever they are in the world, comes from the wires." The statement also stressed that "it is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press."
HuffPost condemned the White House’s decision as a violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of the press. Der Tagesspiegel did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Tuesday, the WHCA also issued a statement protesting the new White House policy.
This move follows the Trump administration’s earlier decision to bar the Associated Press from the press pool because it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America—a name Trump has assigned to the body of water—or update its widely followed stylebook to reflect this change.
Leavitt added that the five major cable and broadcast television networks would continue to hold their rotating seats in the pool, while the White House would include streaming services. Rotating print and radio reporters would also continue to be part of the pool, with new outlets and radio hosts being added.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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