Draining the Press Pool
Donald Trump facing a half-empty White House press pool at the height of the pandemic. Photo courtesy of Flickr.
In a polarized nation, the core value of free speech––enabled by a free press––is among the few subjects most Americans can agree on. Apps, television, radio, social media, and newspapers constitute a practically unlimited range of news sources to which we enjoy free access in the United States, almost exclusively because of our enshrinement of these two fundamental liberties. Freedom of the press in particular is inscribed not only in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but also in the contours of our daily lives. While essential for our national flourishing, these protections have made us accustomed to the stability and accessibility of local, national, and global news. We take for granted the independence of the press, and it becomes easy for demagogues to frame encroachments on journalistic rights as parts of a fight against a so-called “enemy of the people” that has become too entrenched, too protected, and too out of touch. As the Trump administration attacks news organizations on those very terms, our collective assumption that the press will remain free is dangerous if not absurd, for journalists and ordinary citizens alike.
On Tuesday, February 25, newly instated White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that President Donald Trump’s administration will now determine which news outlets will have access to pooled events—more intimate gatherings of journalists with the president—for reporting, which has historically been decided by the non-partisan White House Correspondents’ Association. This decision came a day after the administration won a temporary ruling that now allows them to bar one of the most globally trusted news sources, the Associated Press, from the White House press pool. This action was taken in retaliation against AP for not adhering to Trump’s January 20 executive order titled “Restoring Names that Hold American Greatness,” which renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. We should see these explicit limitations on press freedoms as a wake-up call to a pattern of gradual democratic backsliding in the U.S. that begins with an imminent threat to journalists and ends with the death of the most basic freedoms that we rely on as ordinary citizens. The draining of the press pool is an unmistakable sign that under Trump 2.0, the press is no longer free.
Attempts made by presidents to restrict a robust press are by no means new, but they are now more successful. Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan all tried to limit the free press for various reasons. But most notably in 1971, President Richard Nixon attempted to stop a New York Times story from publishing under claims that their printing of leaked government documents—known as the Pentagon Papers—violated the Espionage Act. His claim was overruled in the U.S. Supreme Court case New York Times vs. United States, which set the precedent that prior restraint—the restriction of speech by the government before it is expressed—against the press was unconstitutional. Despite this ruling, it seems that the Trump administration has found a new angle for prior restraint: by preventing outlets from reporting in the first place.
In the February 25 press conference, Leavitt stated that “all journalists, outlets and voices deserve a seat at this highly coveted table,” explaining that new outlets “that have long been denied” will be added to the already competitive pool rotation, while other outlets—including AP, Bloomberg and Reuters—will lose their permanent spots in the rotation. The White House taking control over this decision rather than the nonpartisan WHCA is a clear attempt by Trump to control how he is reported. What is especially worrying is that these obvious attempts to stack the press pool with administration-friendly reporters are being cloaked under the guise of “fairness.” This begs the question: what does making things “fair” entail, and where have we seen these efforts before?
When we lose the ability to hold our president accountable for the restriction of information and our basic rights, we lose the ability to prevent the rise of tyranny and government oppression. Trump’s restriction of these rights and consolidation of his power against democratic principles are typical of the other authoritarian rulers’ habitual concentration of power. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan shut down newspaper and television stations that aligned with Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic cleric and former ally of Erdoğan, during a “jostle for power” in 2001. Kemal Kirişci and Amanda Sloat of the Brookings Institute cite these press limitations as contributing to the “effect of weakening civil society” in Turkey. Press freedoms in Turkey were further restricted in October of last year when Açuk Radyo, a non-profit media organization, had its broadcast license revoked by Turkey’s broadcast regulator, RTÜK, after a radio guest criticized a national ban on events commemorating the Armenian genocide. In a move earlier this month, Erdoğan imprisoned his main political opponent, Ekrem İmamoğlu.
In similar strongman fashion, the Trump administration is now restricting AP’s ability to report based on Trump’s interpretation of how the news “should be” reported. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” Eugene Daniels, the WHCA president, wrote in a statement on February 25. “It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.” It is not only the future of a free press that Trump’s actions threaten, but the future of a free America. Turkey’s decline began with the targeting of the press and has ended with widespread civil unrest as the people resist the theft of their basic right to criticize the government; to believe that the United States is immune from this pattern is absurd and dangerous.
To be sure, the trends in polarization and discursive erosion that led us to this point predate Trump, but without the complicity of Big Tech oligarchs, these encroachments would be far less pernicious. It is crucial, for example, that Americans have access to unbiased and accurate information. But this is already almost impossible due to legacy media’s political polarization and a precipitous rise in “fake news” and general disinformation propagated through practically every social media platform. Recent rollbacks on social media fact-checking, specifically those on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms and Elon Musk’s X, have had detrimental impacts on the integrity of our online news.
Once again, we can look abroad for the natural conclusion to this brand of collusion: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has for years delegitimized national news outlets by enabling over 80% of the country’s media to be bought out and controlled by his close partisan allies. The result has been feeble opposition to Orbán’s pursuit of total control and the conversion of Hungary’s political system into what has been called “illiberal democracy” but what might be more aptly branded as “electoral authoritarianism.” We are not safe from this reality either: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos—who announced stark partisan changes to The Washington Post’s editorial section on February 25—have an ever-increasing allegiance to Trump and his political agenda, redoubling the threat posed to the “free press” by entrenching oligarchical rule.
Draining the press pool is just the first step in the Trump administration’s efforts to curb our right to a free press. Through elite buyouts of news outlets and social media networks, and through his constant intimidation of the “fake news”—the man made over 100 overt threats against the press in the leadup to the 2024 election alone—Trump is systematically undermining one of the fundamental pillars of American political society. Far from our star-spangled American exceptionalism, the U.S. is experiencing changes that are exceedingly common for declining democracies everywhere.
To strengthen and maintain our democracy, the freedom of the press must be protected and rebranded to average Americans as the cornerstone of free speech that it is. As has been the case across the world, encroachment on reporters’ rights is the natural beginning of a larger threat to the basic ability of regular citizens to be vocally critical of their government’s actions. In other words, it starts with the AP and ends with the American People. Public officials—and their billionaire allies—must be prohibited from exercising political or financial control over news organizations so the news remains independent and as non-partisan as possible. The press is meant to hold our government accountable, not to hold its views.
Nadia Knoblauch (BC ’28) is a staff writer for CPR from Oviedo, Florida. She is studying political science and hopes to pursue a career in journalism. Last year, she was named Florida’s Student Journalist of the Year and was a finalist for National Student Journalist of the Year. She can be reached at nfk2112@barnard.edu.