Don’t Turn W/H Press Pool Into a Propaganda Tool

What’s the White House Press Pool & Why Does It Matter? The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would start handpicking which media outlets were allowed to participate in the presidential press pool, the small, rotating group of reporters who relay the president’s day-to-day activities to the public. The press pool is a rotating group of reporters who travel with the president. They are in a van in the president’s motorcade. They fly on Air Force One. If the president leaves the White House, the pool goes along — whether an official event, dinner with their spouse, or to attend their child’s school event. The pool consists of three wire services (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg), a TV network, a radio reporter, and someone from a print outlet. Their written reports, video, and audio are made available to every other White House reporter. Until this week, the rotation was managed by the White House Correspondents Association — the group that represents the reporters covering the White House. Why It Matters The White House Press Pool serves two primary purposes. First, if the president makes remarks in a room too small to fit the entire press corps — like the Oval Office — the pool goes in and covers it. In these instances, the members of the pool are the ones asking questions. Overnight we learned how the new press pool plan is being implemented. The AP remains banned, and a Reuters wire reporter was also cut from the Wednesday rotation. Staffers from two pro-Trump outlets, Newsmax and The Blaze, were added. And perhaps most tellingly, HuffPost was taken out of its planned Wednesday spot as the print pooler, and replaced by Axios. The message being sent is clear. Much like banning the Associated Press for its refusal to use the patently absurd term “Gulf of America,” reporters either please Dear Leader or they lose the access they so desperately crave. Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin's reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.  This is much bigger than the typical picayune fights over media access. Demanding a compliant media is one of the first moves in an authoritarian takeover.