The Trump White House said it will pick the news outlets that get access to the president from now on — a sharp break from the tradition of independent media groups choosing a group of its peers to cover the commander-in-chief.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday framed the press power grab as an effort to make White House coverage more inclusive and restore “access back to the American people” who elected Trump.
“The White House press team, in this administration, will determine who gets to enjoy the very privileged and limited access in spaces such as Air Force One and the Oval Office,” Leavitt said at a daily briefing. “A select group of D.C.-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House.”
Leavitt said non-traditional media should have a bigger say than traditional media gatekeepers, which Trump’s MAGA supporters often accuse of being biased against conservatives.
“It’s beyond time that the White House press operation reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025, not 1925,” Leavitt said
But media experts said the move raises troubling First Amendment issues because the president is effectively seizing veto power over who covers him, giving the White House leverage to discourage critical or independent coverage.
Trump’s clampdown comes after it barred the Associated Press from many presidential events because the news service has refused to bow to the president’s edict to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America as he has proclaimed.
It remains to be seen how the White House will implement the new policy.
It effectively ends the century-old practice of a White House press organization picking a pool of journalists from every platform to share the president’s words and actions with colleagues who can’t attend some events due to physical space limitations or security concerns.
For example, the White House Correspondents Association decides which reporters go into small spaces like the Oval Office or Air Force One to report on the president’s doings.
Eugene Daniels, a Politico journalist and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the organization consistently expands its membership and pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets.
“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president,” Daniels said in a statement. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
Leavitt spoke a day after a federal judge refused to immediately order the White House to restore the AP’s access to many presidential events.
U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden said the AP had not demonstrated it had suffered irreparable harm. But he urged the Trump administration to reconsider its two-week-old ban, saying that case law in the circuit “is uniformly unhelpful to the White House.”
