Members of the press corps have been circling their wagons around their elite club for a long time, as new and innovative models of journalism have cropped up and threatened the legacy media. The current White House press room covering President Trump is not privileging the status of the longtime legacy media, and that’s making them furious.
Just last month, there were members of the press questioning why The Daily Signal, a news publication affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, was participating in pool reports. Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal’s White House correspondent, has covered the White House for more than 10 years for CNS News, The Blaze, and now The Daily Signal. He’s an award-winning journalist with impeccable credentials.The mainstream media, however, guards every inch of its status, such as writing pool reports, with shocking ferocity. And it should be noted that nobody took issue with the content of any pool reports, merely that someone they perceive to be an outsider from their club was allowed to write them.This isn’t the first time that the media has thrown a hissy fit, and it’s not exclusively about Trump, or even the conservative media. At the dawn of the Obama White House in 2009, the White House press welcomed Politico, The Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Salon and more, to the shock and outrage of some of the journalist insiders. Politico was an upstart web-focused publication, and The Huffington Post was famous for being a blog platform for Hollywood celebrities. As Michael Calderone reported for Politico in 2009:
White House reporters have privately discussed and debated the recent addition of sites like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post to the White House in-town press pool. It’s not that reporters are criticizing the work of either Christina Bellantoni or Sam Stein, but some have expressed concerns about pool reports coming from left- or right-leaning news organizations that will then be used by the rest of the press corps.
Of course, the media survived and the White House press corps endured during the Obama administration (Even if in a diminished capacity).
Furthermore, as legacy media organizations struggle more and more – the number of journalists has been steadily declining as the financial prospects for the traditional media look worse and worse – it will be important for both journalists and news consumers to recognize the legitimacy of nontraditional media.
This doesn’t mean a complete free-for-all for journalism, of course. There are a number of troubling trends in for mainstream journalism. Conspiracy website Infowars, which has promulgated beliefs like Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, has aspirations of having a White House correspondent. Clickbait social media site Gateway Pundit now has its own White House correspondent.
But there’s a difference in kind to objecting to websites like Infowars and Gateway Pundit, and objecting to The Huffington Post or The Daily Caller. If the White House press corps wants to thrive, they’d do well to make the distinction and embrace nontraditional journalism while continuing to eschew conspiracy mongers.
Kevin Glass (@KevinWGlass) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of outreach and policy at The Franklin Center and was previously managing editor at Townhall. His views here are his own.
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