White House begins yanking lefty news outlets from pool rotation
The White House yanked a reporter at a left-leaning news outlet from the rotation of journalists given special access to President Trump, making good on its pledge to rip control away from the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA).HuffPost’s White House correspondent S.V.Date had been slated to serve as the daily print pool reporter Wednesday, but the Trump administration booted him in the wee hours of the night and replaced him with an Axios reporter.The administration also kicked Reuters out of the spot it enjoyed as a wire service.
In the past, Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg were automatically included in the pool reporters because they are wire services that feed reports to news outlets across the country.On Wednesday, only Bloomberg was listed in the pool report slot for wire services.The White House seemingly gave Reuters’ and the AP’s spots to The Blaze in a rebranded “new media” perch and Newsmax in a “secondary TV correspondent and crew” perch.For decades, the White House press corps had an arrangement where a rotating group of news outlets would select reporters to be part of the daily pool, which traditionally included print, wire, television, photo and radio outlets.The White House pool reporters would then get expanded access to closely follow the president into smaller settings usually off-limits for everyone else, such as the Oval Office or flights on Air Force One.Pool reporters are tasked with gathering details about the president’s actions, asking questions when possible and then feeding that information to the rest of the White House press corps.The WHCA has overseen the pool reporter rotation, which includes The Post, for decades.
But on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the administration would take control of that process.“It’s beyond time that the White House press operation reflects the media habits of the American people in 2025, not 1925.
A select group o...