Two White House reporters from very different news outlets have a similar gripe with the White House Correspondents’ Association regarding how it has limited access to President Trump’s coronavirus task force briefings.
Complying with social distancing guidelines to stop the spread of the virus, the organization has restricted the number of reporters who can attend the near-daily briefings in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. The seating chart has been revised to put empty chairs between every seated reporter and no longer allows reporters to stand in the aisles. The move means that the majority of reporters don’t make it into the room on any given day.
Even with rotations in place, larger legacy media outlets get more face time than the smaller ones, and there are some White House correspondents who have been boxed out altogether.
Chanel Rion of One America News Network, a Trump-friendly outlet, and Brian Karem of Playboy, a vocal detractor of the president, share similar frustrations with the WHCA, which is refusing to budge despite their protestations.
Rion, who raised eyebrows last month when she asked the president if Chinese food was racist and accused the “left-wing” media of teaming up with “Chinese Communist Party narratives,” has in recent days caused an uproar for attending the briefings outside of her place in the rotation.
Standing in the back of the room, instead of being seated in the cluster of chairs where the reporters typically are during briefings, Rion bypassed her place in the rotation, declaring she was a guest of White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.
This happened after the WHCA decreased the number of reporters allowed in the briefings to 14, which followed a prior reduction from the normal 49 reporters to 25 in adherence to social distancing guidelines. As these temporary changes were made, OANN’s shared seat changed from being divided among five publications to 10 outlets.
OANN, Newsmax, Al Jazeera, BBC, the Christian Broadcasting Network, CNBC, the Eternal Word Television Network, Fox Business, PBS, and Univision all shared a seat. But with only one reporter allowed to sit in that seat per briefing, OANN felt that it was effectively being pushed out of the briefings after Rion criticized her colleagues in the room.
Charles Herring, president of One America News, said the WHCA “stifles diverse viewpoints in our national news from being heard and is detrimental to our democracy.” In a statement to the Washington Examiner, he also claimed the group “has a history of allowing and supporting a disruptive briefing room run by left-leaning media that directly led to the cancellation by briefings from the Administration.”
But Rion’s workaround way of attending the briefings did not sit well with her peers. Displeased with what it viewed as a violation of attendance protocol, the WHCA voted to remove OANN from the seating rotation altogether.
“We have asked reporters who don’t have a seat not to attend press briefings,” the WHCA board said in a statement on Wednesday. “The WHCA board has voted this evening to remove a news outlet from the rotation for a seat in the briefing room. We did this because a reporter for this outlet twice attended press briefings in contravention of this policy.”
The removal takes OANN out of the rotation until the next review, which generally happens every two years, even in the event the coronavirus subsides before then, a WHCA insider told the Washington Examiner.
It’s unclear how Rion’s invitation will hold up with Grisham leaving her role as White House press secretary on Tuesday to return to the East Wing as chief of staff and spokeswoman for first lady Melania Trump.
Karem is also making a fuss about being excluded from the restricted WHCA rotation, which stems from Playboy not applying for a seat in the briefing room. The rotations are made up of outlets that applied and were granted a seat, except for the foreign pool report seat, which is determined through a different governing body.
Karem blames his exclusion, in part, on the president, arguing the WHCA “got played by Trump” in a recent column. “Some of these reporters are unseasoned, some are sycophants, and some are tough,” he added.
Karem has a tumultuous history with the Trump administration. Last August, he had his press pass revoked after getting into a shouting match with former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, but a judge ordered the White House to reinstate it.
His lawyer, Ted Boustrous, sent a letter to Grisham on Friday demanding they let him “attend today’s and future White House press conferences and briefings.” The letter, which was carbon copied to the Justice Department, accused the press secretary of trying to “circumvent that agreed-upon system” and alleged her conduct was “a plain repudiation of your agreement with the WHCA and violates the First Amendment.”
Ashley Cheung, a lawyer for the Justice Department, wrote back to Boustrous on Sunday, saying he “should direct his complaints to the WHCA, not the Press Secretary,” because the “recent social-distancing rotation put in place to account for the current COVID-19 epidemic was adopted solely by the WHCA.”
The White House declined to comment on the letter.
Asked to respond to the Justice Department’s answer, Boustrous told the Washington Examiner: “We understand the need to limit the number of attendees to ensure health and safety, but a fair process is essential. We have requested that the White House Correspondents’ Association give Mr. Karem and similarly situated reporters fair access to the rotation for press conferences.”
Jon Karl, a correspondent with ABC News and the president of the WHCA, told the Washington Examiner the group has no intention of acquiescing to their demands.
Other outlets, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNBC, have opted not to have a reporter attend the briefings for a variety of reasons, including health precautions, according to the Washington Post. They instead cover the events remotely, as each briefing is broadcast live. The decisions to stop sending reporters to the briefings came as an unnamed correspondent was displaying symptoms of the coronavirus but ultimately tested negative.
