The White House yanked a reporter at a left-leaning news outlet from the rotation of journalists given special access to President Trump, making good on its pledge to rip control away from the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA).
HuffPost’s White House correspondent S.V. Date had been slated to serve as the daily print pool reporter Wednesday, but the Trump administration booted him in the wee hours of the night and replaced him with an Axios reporter.
The administration also kicked Reuters out of the spot it enjoyed as a wire service. In the past, Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg were automatically included in the pool reporters because they are wire services that feed reports to news outlets across the country.
On Wednesday, only Bloomberg was listed in the pool report slot for wire services. The White House seemingly gave Reuters’ and the AP’s spots to The Blaze in a rebranded “new media” perch and Newsmax in a “secondary TV correspondent and crew” perch.
For decades, the White House press corps had an arrangement where a rotating group of news outlets would select reporters to be part of the daily pool, which traditionally included print, wire, television, photo and radio outlets.
The White House pool reporters would then get expanded access to closely follow the president into smaller settings usually off-limits for everyone else, such as the Oval Office or flights on Air Force One.
Pool reporters are tasked with gathering details about the president’s actions, asking questions when possible and then feeding that information to the rest of the White House press corps.
The WHCA has overseen the pool reporter rotation, which includes The Post, for decades. But on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the administration would take control of that process.
“It’s beyond time that the White House press operation reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025, not 1925. A select group of DC-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly over the privilege of press access at the White House,” Leavitt said at a press briefing Monday.
HuffPost had been scheduled to serve as the print pool outlet weeks in advance.
But after 10 p.m. Tuesday, the Trump administration informed Date via email that they “can’t fit you in the pool tomorrow.”
Date has clashed with President Trump in the past. By Wednesday morning, the White House revealed that a journalist at Axios was replacing him.
“We had nothing to do with the decision to remove HuffPost and were unaware of that decision when we accepted the spot,” an Axios spokesperson told The Post.
“While we believe the WHCA should retain the right to decide who is in the press pool, Axios continues to participate in the current rotation because it is our job to cover every administration.”
HuffPost editor-in-chief Whitney Snyder slammed the move as an “egregious violation of the First Amendment.”
“Americans deserve fair and honest reporting on their president,” Snyder said in a statement. “The White House must stop this cowardly behavior and restore HuffPost’s place in the press pool immediately.”
The WHCA’s president Eugene Daniels denounced the Trump administration’s move to meddle in the pool rotation process, arguing it “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”
The move comes amid a simmering feud between the Trump administration and the AP over the outlet’s refusal to change its style guidance from “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” On Monday, the Trump administration won an initial court decision over its exclusion of the AP from the pool report.
“Much of the White House coverage people see in their local news outlets, wherever they are in the world,
comes from the wires,” the AP’s, Reuters’ and Bloomberg’s editors wrote in a joint statement Wednesday.
“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press. We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle.”
