White House bars major news outlets from briefing
Trump blasts media, anonymous sources — after WH uses them
News organizations including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico were blocked from joining an informal, on-the-record White House press briefing Friday.
The Associated Press chose not to participate in the briefing after White House press secretary Sean Spicer restricted the number of journalists included. Typically, the daily briefing is televised and open to all news organizations credentialed to cover the White House.
“The AP believes the public should have as much access to the president as possible,” Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations, said in a statement.
On Friday, hours after President Donald Trump delivered a speech blasting the media, Spicer invited only a pool of news organizations that represents and shares reporting with the larger press corps. He also invited several other major news outlets, as well as smaller organizations including the conservative Washington Times, One America News Network and Breitbart News, whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, is Trump’s chief strategist. When the additional news organizations attempted to gain access, they weren’t allowed to enter.
The White House said it felt “everyone was represented” by those in the pool and the invited organizations.
“We decided to add a couple of additional people beyond the pool. Nothing more than that,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders.
When asked by a reporter attending whether he was playing favorites, Spicer said the White House had “shown an abundance of accessibility,” according to an audio recording of the briefing later circulated by the pool.
The pool included Reuters, Bloomberg, CBS, Hearst Newspapers and CBS Radio. Others in the briefing were Fox, NBC and ABC. Bloomberg reported that its reporter was unaware of the exclusions until after the briefing.
John Roberts, Fox’s chief White House correspondent, told anchor Shepard Smith on the air Friday that Fox supports complaints being filed by the White House Correspondents Association and pool TV networks.
“You can speculate, Shep, that there might be some extenuating circumstances as to why those people were not invited, we’re going to look into that further....” Roberts said.
In a statement, the correspondent association’s president, Jeff Mason, said the group was “protesting strongly” against how the briefing was handled by the White House.
CBS News said in a statement that it was the pool’s radio and TV outlet Friday.
“We recorded audio of this event and quickly shared it out of an obligation to protect the interests of all pool members,” the news division said.
When Spicer was asked by a reporter at the briefing whether he was playing favorites, he said he “disagreed with the premise of the question,” according to the audio.
“We’ve brought more reporters into this process. And the idea that every time that every single person can’t get their question answered or fit in a room that we’re excluding people. We’ve actually gone above and beyond with making ourselves, our team, and our briefing room more accessible than probably any prior administration. And so I think you can take that to the bank.
“We do what we can to accommodate the press. I think we’ve gone above and beyond when it comes to accessibility, and openness and getting folks — our officials, our team.”
During a panel last December, Spicer said that open access for the media is “what makes a democracy a democracy.”
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.”
Trump didn’t expand on what he had in mind or which news organizations he was talking about. But his 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 center 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.”
Nicholas Henderson of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was there in his “Make America Great Again” hat and pronounced Trump’s speech rousing.
“He touched on a lot of things we’d already heard before, which is reassuring, tells us he’s still committed to those promises he made during the campaign,” Henderson said.
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.”