The Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck continued his fangirling over authoritarian House House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a Feb. 25 post praising Leavitt’s partisan-driven shakeup of the White House press pool:
On Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt sent shockwaves down the paper-thin spines of the White House press corps as she declared the end of the press pool as we know it and that the administration, not the smarmy White House Correspondents Association (WHCA), would determine the rotation of reporters who’d accompany the President in tighter confines, such as the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
Leavitt led into this with more bad news for the liberal media, which was her reaction to a federal judge denying “Associated Press’s emergency motion for a temporary restraining order against” her and two colleagues for kicking them out of the pool for their refusal to relabel the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
She correctly pointed out the pool and its perks are “a privilege that unfortunately has only been granted to a few” and “not,” despite what they assert, “a legal right for all.”
This led directly into her insistence that the pool — made up of one correspondent each from print, radio, and TV, the three wire services (AP, Bloomberg, and Reuters), and three photojournalists — would be expanded to ensure “new outlets to have a chance…to cover this administration’s unprecedented achievements up close, front and center.”
She provided those watching with a brief history lesson, including the elitist WHCA’s stranglehold on whomever they view as legitimate. Even in her announcement, she made clear such outlets would still be part of the rotation[.]
Of course, this means that Leavitt becomes the elitist, the one who will determine what media outlets are legitimate. Houck didn’t mention that, of course, let alone explain why that’s an improvement.
Tim Graham spun this announcement on his podcast the next day:
They called it a “bombshell” on Tuesday, when Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced they were going to take the credentialing and pooling powers away from the liberal press. Liberals screamed, conservatives cheered. New York Times reporter Peter Baker tweeted “this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.” That’s not what Trump did.
Does Graham really think that restricting the press pool to compliant journalists is not the ultimate goal here?
Clay Waters complained in a Feb. 27 post that a PBS news show “featured guest Brian Stelter, editor of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter (and reliable white knight for the mainstream media) to discuss the “chilling effect” of the Trump Administration blocking the Associated Press from the White House pool of reporters.” Houck spent a March 3 post being upset that even Fox News was asking critical questions about this move:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared Sunday on the Fox News Channel’s MediaBuzz and debated host Howard Kurtz on a slew of subjects over two segments, including the Associated Press hubbub over its ban from the press pool (the smaller, rotating group of journalists that follow the President to smaller events and on Air Force One) and the press shop taking over the pool’s make-up.
[…]Kurtz made clear his feelings about the pool from the top of the show, explaining the press and White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) were right to be “up in arms about a major change to the White House pool” because “White House officials will grant this privilege mainly to friendly reporters who have sympathetic questions.”
He also argued the WHCA should remain in power of who gets access to the President because “the big media companies pay most of the charges for flying on Air Force One[.]”
At another point, Kurtz brought up the press pool and said she could be looking to bar “legacy media outlets as part of the pool, largely picking friendly reporters who will ask friendly question.”
Leavitt said she’d “have to fundamentally disagree” noted two of their more recent poolers were vehemently anti-Trump outlets in The Independent and the Los Angeles Times on the print side and CNN as a TV pooler (on both Friday and Saturday).
“This is not about revoking the right of — of biased news organizations to be in the Oval Office or to cover this President. It’s simply about ending the monetized monopoly that the White House Correspondents’ Association has had over press coverage at the White House…The [WHCA] began more than 100 years ago. Certainly, the media and digital age has changed since the nine — early nineteen hundreds and we are simply trying to reflect that change,” she added.
Kurtz then defended the WHCA against claims of being “an elite group” because “its members are elected by the press corps at large to represent their interests and also there’s the question of who pays for flights on Air Force One as “a lot of people don’t know that the reporters are charged for that.”
Leavitt addressed both plus whether she still believes legacy media outlets have a role in the press corps[.]
Again: the obvious goal here is to eventually ease out anyone who’s not a part of the Trump Regime Media. Houck, like Graham, is being intentionally obtuse about this — after all, he’s part of that Trump Regime Media.