White House bars news groups from briefing
Battle over anonymous sources escalates
WASHINGTON • President Donald Trump unloaded on the news media Friday for using anonymous sources — just hours after members of his own staff insisted on briefing reporters only on condition their names be concealed.
Unleashing a line of attack that energized an enthusiastic crowd at the nation’s largest gathering of conservative activists, Trump said unethical reporters “make up stories and make up sources.”
“They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” he declared. “Let their name be put out there.”
Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference that while not all reporters are bad, the “fake news” crowd “doesn’t represent the people. It will never represent the people and we’re going to do something about it.”
After Trump’s speech, several news organizations including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico were blocked from joining a White House media briefing.
Reaction from barred media outlets was swift.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties. We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest,” Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, said in a statement.
“This is an unacceptable development by the Trump White House. Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like. We’ll keep reporting regardless,” CNN said in a statement.
The Associated Press chose not to participate following the move by White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations, said in a statement: “The AP believes the public should have as much access to the president as possible.”
Trump’s broadsides represented an escalation of his running battle against the press, which he has taken to calling “the opposition party.”
The president has chafed at a number of anonymously sourced stories, including numerous reports describing contacts between his campaign advisers and Russian intelligence agents, which the White House has sharply disputed.
However, members of his White House team regularly demand anonymity when talking to reporters. That was the case Friday morning when Trump officials briefed reporters on chief of staff Reince Priebus’ contact with top FBI officials concerning the Russia reports.
Trump’s appearance at CPAC represented a triumph for both speaker and audience — each ascendant after years when they were far from the centre of the political universe.
Elizabeth Connors of New York recalled past gatherings as collections of the “downtrodden.”
Today, she said, “it’s energized” after years in which “we’ve been just pushed down, pushed down, pushed down.”
Trump, who first appeared at CPAC as a reality TV star six years ago, recalled his past visits with nostalgia, saying the crowd helped put him on the path to the presidency.
“I loved the commotion,” he said. “And then they did these polls where I went through the roof and I wasn’t even running, right? But it gave me an idea.”