The leaders of three major wire services — the Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg News — pushed back on the White House decision to control who is a member of the press pool, saying that it threatened press freedom.
“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press,” the editors of the services said in a joint statement. “We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle. It also harms the spread of reliable information to people, communities, businesses and global financial markets that heavily depend on our reporting.”
On Tuesday, the White House announced that it would take control of deciding who was a member of the press pool, the group of about a dozen or so correspondents who get access to the Oval Office and other events where space is limited. Often, it has been members of the pool that have been able to ask the president questions, as happened today as Donald Trump held his first cabinet meeting.
For decades, it has been the non profit White House Correspondents’ Association that has handled the scheduling of pool correspondents, an arrangement that has ensured that the rotation of reporters was free from government interference.
The AP, Bloomberg and Reuters reporters have been the three permanent wire services in the pool.
But Trump has previously barred the AP from White House events, and today, Reuters also was excluded. Wire service access was limited to Bloomberg. The White House added two outlets on the right, Newsmax and Blaze Media, to the pool. HuffPost was scheduled to be in rotation, but the Trump team replaced the left-leaning outlet with Axios. Trump had gone off on the HuffPost earlier this month after its reporter, S.V. Date, posed a question while he was on pool duty on Air Force One.
