by WorldTribune Staff, February 28, 2025 Real World News
MAGA has essentially stripped the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) of its power.
During President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, reporters from HuffPost, Reuters, and a foreign press representative were removed from the press pool covering the meeting.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reaffirmed the administration’s stance that it has the authority to select which outlets are allowed to cover the president in limited-space events. That change was made on Tuesday, when the White House stripped the WHCA from making those decisions and took the roll on themselves.
The reporters kicked out of the Cabinet meeting on Wednesday join the Associated Press reporter and photographer who were removed indefinitely from limited-spaced access to Trump after the AP refused to use Gulf of America instead of “Gulf of Mexico” in its reporting. This week, a judge temporarily upheld the White House’s stance on that pending a further hearing.
The move strips the WHCA of its role in picking what it describes as the “small team of writers, photographers and technicians assigned each day to cover the commander-in-chief on behalf of the broader corps of correspondents.”
“For decades, a group of D.C.-based journalists — White House Correspondents Association — has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore. I am proud to announce that we are going to give power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations,” Leavitt said.
HuffPost White House reporter SV Date did not take kindly to the MAGA booting.
“I will say this, I’ve been pooling now for 10 years, since the Obama administration,” Date said. “The number of times that the Obama White House, Trump White House 1, Biden White House and Trump White House 2 in the times that I’ve pooled so far have asked for a mistake to be corrected in one of my pool reports? Zero. None. Never.”
“The number of times that any of those White Houses have asked for a correction in one of my stories, that’s also zero,” he continued. “So, it’s not about accuracy, it’s not about competence, and I’ll let them explain what it’s about.”
Oh, and by the way, Date has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration, having previously authored a book about Trump titled “The Useful Idiot.”
The WHCA is currently led by a reporter from Politico.
Until MAGA took back the White House, the WHCA “was often able to shape the news by determining what questions are asked of the president during daily events, which are usually only accessible to pool reporters,” The Daily Wire’s Daniel Chaitin noted. “White House reporters not granted access to the pool are mostly confined to the press briefing room, where there are only a few briefings each week.”
The WHCA had also determined who was given a permanent seat in the briefing room.
As Leavitt put it on Tuesday: “It’s beyond time the White House press pool reflects the media habits of the American people.”
So, now, the White House Correspondents Association is primarily a social organization that puts on the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner that excludes MAGA types including the current occupant of the White House?
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