The relationship between the White House and its press corps is time-tested — and can be contentious
The relationship between the White House and its press corps is time-tested — and can be contentious
This week, the White House barred Associated Press journalists from three media appearances by President Donald Trump — two of them in the Oval Office itself. Some of the reaction said, effectively, this: What right do you have to be there, anyway?
The answer is a combination of tradition, independent reporting and the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press.
The AP, a global news outlet founded in 1846, is a source of fact-based, independent news that reaches billions of people every day. The news cooperative has been a member of the 13-person White House press pool that has reported on the president and held him accountable since its inception more than a century ago.
The pool gets access to the president on the understanding that it distributes his comments and activities to other news outlets, congressional offices and more.
When the Trump administration blocked the AP from three events, it didn’t just bar the outlet from access to the president; it did so after an or-else demand that the news agency change its style from “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America,” per Trump’s presidential order.
The AP has said that it will refer to the water as the Gulf of Mexico, while noting Trump’s decision to rename it as well. As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP says it must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.
Here is some background about the relationship between the presidency and the press — now and across the years.
There are First Amendment issues
The First Amendment to the Bill of Rights states that the government “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” To AP Executive Editor Julie Pace, Trump’s move — an attempt to use a news outlet’s access to him to control the content it published — is “a plain violation of the First Amendment.”
“The actions taken by this White House were plainly intended to punish the AP for the content of its speech,” Pace wrote Wednesday to Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. “It is among the most basic tenets of the First Amendment that the government cannot retaliate against the public or the press for what they say.”
The White House pointed out that the AP was allowed into its briefing Wednesday but continued to take issue with the style of the gulf’s name.
“Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday. “We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office.”
The White House does not pick the members of the press pool that goes in to the Oval Office. The pool makeup is decided by the members of the press corps themselves and is designed to represent everyone in all formats.
The relationship between the president and the press is intended to be adversarial. That’s essential for knowing what the president and his administration are — or are not — doing in the United States’ name with taxpayer money.
Freely questioning elected lawmakers is the reason, for example, why congressional reporters can roam most of the same Capitol hallways as members of the House and Senate and pose questions on behalf of Americans. At the White House, a smaller secure compound that functions as a residence, work space and event venue, the rules of access are more strict. But it, too, belongs to Americans.
“The press is there to represent readers, viewers and listeners all over the world whose lives are going to be affected by what happens in the Oval Office but who are not able to be physically present themselves,” said Kathy Kiely, professor of free press studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. “The reporters ensure that the public gets information beyond the self-interested accounts provided by the president and his public relations team.”
What is the White House press pool?
The first known instance of a so-called pool reporter inside the White House was in 1881 after President James A. Garfield was shot. As the chief executive lay in bed, AP reporter Franklin Trusdell sat outside his sick room, listening to him breathe and sharing updates with other correspondents.
Now, it’s a group of news outlets that ideally are almost everywhere the president goes: in the Oval Office, to state dinners, on Air Force One, in the motorcade, and when the president goes golfing or biking, It was with Trump at the Super Bowl. The pool is also always on standby in case something happens in the world about which the president needs to speak to the nation.
One reason the pool exists is because the Oval Office, the president’s official work space, is too small to accommodate every news outlet that would want to cover his executive order signings or meetings with foreign dignitaries. So the pool operates with a representative of each medium acting as eyes and ears for the others who can’t get in. When a “pooled” event is over, the print, television and radio poolers share written notes, video and audio with everyone else who is interested.
The pool maintains strict decorum, according to the White House Correspondents’ Association guidelines. It is standard practice to stand when the president enters the room. Even though shouting is “unacceptable,” presidential appearances can get rowdy.
The White House press pool represents every media format and daily includes the AP and other wire-service writers, the AP and other photographers, a television crew, radio correspondent and writers for print and online publications.
The pool was in John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas when he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. That allowed for firsthand accounts of the event as conspiracy theories spread, an example of why independent reporting is critical to understanding what is happening around the president.
“There was a loud bang as though a giant firecracker had exploded in the cavern between the tall buildings we were just leaving behind us,” AP reporter Jack Bell, who was in the motorcade with other reporters, recalled to Columbia Journalism Review. “The man in front of me screamed, ‘My God, they’re shooting at the president!’”
George W. Bush was on camera at a school in Florida Sept. 11, 2001, when an aide whispered in his ear that America was under attack. More recently, the pool was in St. Croix on the night that former President Jimmy Carter died. The White House told the pool to stand by, and at a certain point transported the pool to a downtown hotel where then-President Joe Biden spoke about his predecessor and answered some questions.
Presidents and reporters: An inherently adversarial relationship
Trump is famous for courting reporters even as he publicly criticizes them. Now, legacy media is on its heels amid an atmosphere of distrust as people get news from other sources — some less credible than others.
He’s not the first to try to go around traditional outlets. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his fireside chats over the radio as some of the nation’s biggest newspapers took issue with government expansion under the New Deal. More recently, television and social media — and especially podcasts during the 2024 election — have provided similar workarounds for presidents.
In 1798, John Adams signed the Sedition Act, which made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government and used it to jail journalists, according to the National Archives. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson threatened to end presidential briefings with reporters, resulting in what became the White House Correspondents’ Association.
For all the tensions, the nation’s founders recognized the value of a free press in American democracy.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,” future President Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1787, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
By LAURIE KELLMAN
Associated Press
