White House to Take Control of Press Pool

The White House said Tuesday that its officials "will decide" which news outlets can regularly cover President Trump up close—a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services, the AP reports. She cast the change as a modernization of the press pool, saying the move would be more inclusive and restore "access back to the American people" who elected Trump.

• "Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team," Leavitt said at a daily briefing. "A select group of DC-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House."
• Critics of the move included Peter Baker, the New York Times' chief White House correspondent, the Hill reports. "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," Baker said in a post on X.
• Leavitt spoke a day after a federal judge refused to immediately order the White House to restore the APs' access to many presidential events. The news outlet, citing the First Amendment, sued Leavitt and two other White House officials for barring the AP from some presidential events over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" as Trump ordered.

(More White House press corps stories.)