Silke Jasso
In case members of the national press needed any more evidence that Donald Trump will take a more adversarial approach to them, all they had to do was read last weekend’s story in the National Enquirer. There, three Trump administration officials made their motivations clear: the White House Press Corps is an entity to be quarantined away from the West Wing rather than respected as part of it. In the words of one Trump administration official, “They [the press] are the opposition party. …I want ‘em out of the building. We are taking back the press room.”
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White House chief of staff-designate Reince Priebus spent much of Sunday morning trying to put that story to bed. Yes, the Trump administration is debating whether to move the press corps out of the White House briefing room, he said, but only because the briefing room is too small and so many reporters want to cover the White House. Moving journalists into another building in the White House complex would allow more access to the president-elect and his staff. Nothing to see here, Priebus said: “We had like 500 or 600 folks at the press conference last week so we started thinking… if we can have more people involved than less people involved, that would be a good thing.”
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Before jumping to conclusions and stigmatizing Trump as a dictator, we should put things into perspective. In general, stories don’t get broken within the confines of the White House briefing room; at best, it’s a forum for journalists to ask questions in an attempt to trip up the president’s press secretary. The good press secretaries (Mike McCurray, Ari Fleischer and Josh Earnest) take the questions in stride and stick to their talking points. Others wither and say things they later regret or that turn out to be incorrect (think Scott McClellan on Valeria Plame and Jay Carney on Benghazi). But in general, the White House daily briefings are an opportunity for White House officials to tow the line and get their version of the story out, rather than break serious news.
That being said, reporters roaming the halls of the White House and having access to members of the communications staff is a decades-old tradition that has served the press well. The informal exchanges between members of the press and administration officials are precisely the kinds of interactions that the founders of this country fought so hard to allow in the U.S. Constitution. The American people depend on reporters to oversee their government, serve as a check on the presidency, inform them when their taxpayer dollars are being spent unwisely, and keep a lookout for corruption that they otherwise wouldn’t know anything about.
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Priebus and incoming press secretary Sean Spicer may see moving the press corps to another building as a matter of convenience, but to many outside the inner confines of the Trump administration, it looks like a transparent attempt to restrict access to the West Wing — and, by definition, restrict the freedom of investigative reporters to do the job that the public expects them to do. A bigger briefing room, of course, also means more room for conservative bloggers who toe the Trump line and less room for reporters from major outlets whom the president-elect dismisses as “fake news.”
Donald Trump isn’t going to win this battle. In fact, he’s picking an unnecessary fight that will not only poison whatever relationship he still has with the press, but redouble the efforts of reporters to scrutinize the new administration. Trump should save himself the trouble.
