White House blocks press from briefing
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The White House excluded several major US news organizations, including some it has criticized, from an off-camera briefing held by the press secretary on Friday.
Reporters for CNN, The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed were not allowed into the session in the office of Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Spicer’s off-camera briefing or “gaggle” replaced the usual televised daily news briefing in the White House briefing room. He did not say why those particular news organizations were excluded, a decision that drew strong protests.
Reuters was included in the session, along with about 10 other news organizations, including Bloomberg and CBS.
US President Donald Trump has regularly attacked the media and at a gathering of conservative activists on Friday criticized news organizations that he said provide “fake news,” calling them the “enemy” of the American people.
Spicer said his team decided to have a gaggle in his office instead of a full briefing in the larger White House briefing room and argued that “we don’t need to do everything on camera every day.” Reporters of the Associated Press and Time magazine walked out of the briefing when hearing that others had been barred from the session.
Off-camera gaggles are not unusual. The White House often invites handpicked outlets in for briefings, typically for specific topics. But briefings and gaggles in the White House are usually open to all outlets and they are free to ask anything. A pool reporter from Hearst
Newspapers was included in the gaggle on Friday and gave full details to the entire press corps. Media outlets allowed into the gaggle also shared their audio with others.
Spicer’s decision drew a sharp response from some of the media outlets that were excluded.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York
Times, said in a statement. “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.”