In the White House briefing room Tuesday, the Trump administration announced its latest steps to tighten its grip on the message it sends out and the news coverage it receives.
No longer would the White House Correspondents' Association, made up of news outlets that cover the White House, determine how they will share coverage of President Trump at major events where space is limited.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the assembled reporters the White House would make that determination instead. Leavitt said the media association previously had "dictated" who was able to report directly on Trump and with this move, she was returning "power to the people."
"Legacy outlets who have participated in the press pool for decades will still be allowed to join – fear not," Leavitt said from the White House lectern. "We will also be offering the privilege to well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility." The television pool will not be affected, despite the president's differences with many major networks; before entering electoral politics, Trump was a frequent subject of tabloid and television attention and then a reality TV star.
Press outlets "pool" their resources when coverage by all would be impractical; a selection of print, video, radio, online and photo news organizations alternate in doing the reporting. The Trump administration already has barred The Associated Press, a mainstay of those pools, from covering major events because it has not changed its guidance for calling the body of water between Mexico and Florida the Gulf of America, rather than the Gulf of Mexico.
"In free countries, like the United States is, leaders don't get to pick who covers them day in and day out," Politico reporter Eugene Daniels, the head of the White House Correspondents Association, told NPR's Ari Shapiro Tuesday evening on All Things Considered.
Leavitt already has invited once-fringe figures from far-right outlets into the press room to ask questions. They include reporters for the conspiracy-minded Gateway Pundit, Steve Bannon's podcast and Lindell TV, started by the MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell. While ideological journalists have attended White House briefings for decades, she has amplified their role.
"It's surreal to watch these so-called new media people asking softball, ludicrous questions to Trump and Leavitt," another White House reporter said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions from a boss or the administration. "I never thought I'd see plants in press briefings of the highest seat of American power."
Declaring "VICTORY"
The AP filed a lawsuit over the ban, saying the White House violated its First Amendment free speech rights and its Fifth Amendment procedural rights, as it had no opportunity to appeal the decision internally. At a hearing on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, pushed Justice Department lawyers to reconsider the administration's stance toward the AP. Yet the judge also questioned why the correspondents' association had such discretion over who participated.
The White House appears to have either taken inspiration or refuge from the judge's words - with Leavitt's buoyant announcement the very next day. She was flanked by television screens showing a map of the Southeastern U.S., each stamped with the word "VICTORY" in all capital letters. It showed the Gulf of Mexico marked as the Gulf of America, Trump's preferred term.
The AP's refusal to change its Stylebook to reflect the president's preference, expressed in an executive order on his first day in office, led to the ban, Trump and Leavitt have said. Judge McFadden suggested that sounded like viewpoint discrimination, something the courts have found violates the First Amendment. Yet he declined the news agency's request for an emergency decree to force the administration to back off the ban. Instead, he set a hearing for March 20.
Meanwhile, the president's chief regulator of broadcast media has instigated investigations of each of the major broadcast outlets – ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR and PBS – save Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which is a corporate sister of the pro-Trump Fox News Channel. In 2016, Murdoch struck an alliance of convenience with Trump. It briefly flagged, until last year when Trump once more dominated the Republican primaries.
The president, in his private capacity, has filed many lawsuits against media and social media companies. The owners of ABC, Facebook, and X have each paid millions of dollars to settle lawsuits he filed against them. Paramount, CBS's corporate parent, which is seeking government approval of a sale, is weighing whether to follow their example in Trump's $20 billion suit over its interview with Kamala Harris last year. Legal observers almost uniformly say the president has no merit to his case.
A pincer movement
The administration is operating something of a pincer movement, applying pressure to all possible vulnerabilities.
"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," Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
"The message is clear," Baker continued. "Given that the White House has already kicked one news organization out of the pool because of coverage it does not like, it is making certain everyone else knows that the rest of us can be barred too if the president does not like our questions or stories."
Other veteran reporters also reacted with alarm.
"This move does not give the power back to the people - it gives power to the White House," Jacqui Heinrich, who covers Trump for Fox News, tweeted after Leavitt announced the White House would pick which reporters could serve in press pools. "Our job is to advocate for the MOST access possible."
The pressure on the press dovetails with Trump's efforts to clamp down on independent checks on his power within the executive branch. Among the myriad government officials he has dismissed are agency inspectors general and Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, who investigates federal employees' complaints against the government. He's fired senior military lawyers, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – a former Fox star – said could be "roadblocks" to the White House's agenda.
Under Hegseth, the Defense Department has dislodged eight news organizations from permanent work stations at the Pentagon, including NPR, and invited in seven conservative and right-wing news outlets to replace them (along with one liberal outfit, HuffPost).
A Reuters defense correspondent tweeted that Hegseth was traveling to visit Guantanamo Bay to visit the new U.S.-run detention center for immigrants without a single reporter who routinely covers the military. Pentagon social media accounts painstakingly documented his comings and goings. The "DOD rapid response" social media account taunted CNN after it departed its small work space and mocked the news media last night: "Since real journalism is dead, we'll do it for you."
Trump's picks visit Voice of America
Some journalists who cover the administration say they believe that veers into propaganda. And that's what is feared by many journalists over at the government-owned Voice of America, who were pressured intensely during Trump's first term. His choice to lead it, Kari Lake, appeared for the first time at the international network yesterday, according to five people there. That said, it was hardly a secret: She tweeted out a picture of the network's nameplate at the entry of its Washington, D.C. headquarters. "Let's Get To Work," she wrote.
Lake is a former local news anchor in Phoenix who ran, unsuccessfully, for governor and then U.S. Senate from Arizona. She has denied election losses (both hers and Trump's) and become a frequent critic of the mainstream media.
Voice of America (VOA), which is funded by Congress, operates in nearly 50 languages and reaches an estimated 354 million people weekly across the globe. It is a form of soft power in that it delivers news to places where the press cannot operate freely or is not financially robust, and it models how a free press operates, incorporating criticism as well as praise for each U.S. administration.
Trump announced Lake's selection as though the position involves a presidential appointment. It does not; the appointment is done by the head of VOA's parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and approved by a bipartisan board. Confirmation hearings have not yet been scheduled for Trump's pick to lead the USAGM, the right-wing media critic Brent Bozell.
At the time of her selection, Lake wrote, "Under my leadership, the VOA will excel in its mission: chronicling America's achievements worldwide." That's not precisely the network's stated mission. On its website, Voice of America says it's committed to "providing comprehensive coverage of the news and telling audiences the truth."
As she awaits her appointment at Voice of America, Lake has taken a role as an adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. In recent days, she has defended the Voice of America's existence from calls for its elimination by presidential adviser Elon Musk. She took to Musk's social media platform X to do so.
"I think it's worth getting in, digging around, fixing what's wrong, bolstering what's good, & putting out an incredible product that fulfills its mission, broadcasting the American story across the globe, & spreading the ideals of freedom & liberty," she wrote, linking an interview she sat for with the pro-Trump outlet Epoch Times.
Another new adviser to VOA's parent agency is Mora Namdar, who worked for USAGM in the first Trump administration. She also wrote the section on the agency for Project 2025, the blueprint for governing developed by the Heritage Foundation. Trump disavowed Project 2025 on the campaign trail, but now in office, he has enacted several of its proposals.
In her section on the agency, Namdar wrote that Voice of America and other U.S. owned international outlets often "parrot America's adversaries' propaganda and talking points."
She was part of an effort by Trump appointee Michael Pack, USAGM's chief executive for seven months in 2020, to root out perceived ideological bias throughout the network. A federal judge found that Pack violated constitutional protections. A formal investigation determined that Pack had repeatedly abused the powers of his office, broke laws and regulations, and engaged in gross mismanagement.
Ultimately, interviews with more than two dozen people showed that Trump's aides at the White House and USAGM wanted the network to reflect Trump's successes and to tamp down on criticisms of him - a consistent thread of recent developments.
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