The White House Correspondents’ Association on Friday “strongly” protested the White House decision to host an invite-only press briefing on Friday that excluded outlets like the New York Times and CNN.
“The WHCA board is protesting strongly against how today’s gaggle is being handled by the White House,” Reuters reporter and chairman of the association Jeff Mason said in a statement Friday. “We encourage the organizations that were allowed in to share the material with others in the press corps who were not. The board will be discussing this further with White House staff.”
There was no televised daily White House briefing on Friday, and instead, White House press secretary Sean Spicer invited some reporters to a “gaggle” in the afternoon. The Washington Examiner was among the outlets invited to the briefing.
Those not invited were the New York Times, the Hill, Politico, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail, BBC, CNN, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News.
Time magazine and the Associated Press were invited but declined to attend the briefing.
“I think that we have shown an abundance of accessibility,” Spicer said during the meeting, noting that there were complaints from journalists who were not invited. “We have brought more reporters into this process and the idea that every time, that every person can’t get their question answered or fit into the briefing room – we’ve actually gone above and beyond in making ourselves our team and our briefing room more accessible than probably any prior administration.”
Many in the media complained about being shut out.
New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi said on Twitter that “discriminating against certain outlets IS a story.”
Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple, also on Twitter, said that New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Elisabeth Bumiller told him, “Our most experienced White House reporters have never seen anything like this.”
NYT Wash buro chief Elisabeth Bumiller to me on gaggle block: “Our most experienced WH reporters have never seen anything like this.”
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 24, 2017
In an email to association members Thursday, Mason said the association board had asked the White House press office for more “gaggles,” which are somewhat informal opportunities for reporters to ask questions of officials. The email did not say that the gaggles were intended to replace the briefing.
Reporters have worried about changes President Trump would make to the White House’s relationship with the press.
In December, there were rumors that the daily briefings could stop altogether or that reporters would be banned from working on the White House premises.
Neither rumors have come to pass.
The controversy Friday came the same day that Trump spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., and in his speech accused much of the news media of being “fake” and making up anonymous sources.
