The battle between President Donald Trump and the media that cover him took another turn when he departed Monday for Saudi Arabia.
Trump left with a host of press aboard Air Force One, but for the first time in decades, no one from the Associated Press, Reuters, or Bloomberg was with him. The Trump administration has been warring with the three wire services since shortly after he took office, and the latest escalation led to a statement from White House Correspondents’ Association President Eugene Daniels.
“For the first time since the White House press corps started traveling with American presidents abroad, no wire service reporter is aboard Air Force One today,” Daniels said in a statement released Monday afternoon.
“Leaving out the wires is a disservice to Americans who need news about their president, especially on foreign trips where anything could happen and the consequences can impact the entire world,” Daniels continued.
Wire services feed stories to other news sources, in particular the Associated Press, a 178-year-old organization that provides content for more than 1,200 media outlets.
Trump began his feud with the wire service when the Associated Press refused to go along with his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, locking it out of the Oval Office and the presidential plane as a result. When the Trump White House lost a subsequent lawsuit over the exclusion, it responded by eliminating the wire service spot from pool coverage rotations, impacting Bloomberg and Reuters as well.
“For decades, the daily presence of the wire services in the press pool has ensured that investors and voters across the United States and around the world can rely on accurate real-time reporting on what the president says and does,” Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait said when the news was handed down. “We deeply regret the decision to remove that permanent level of scrutiny and accountability.”
The White House counters that it is actually expanding press access by adding new outlets to the coverage rotation and keeping the wires included as well, albeit less frequently. Outlets represented on the Saudi Arabia trip include CBS, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Daily Mail. An Associated Press photographer is present as well, but no reporter for the outlet is going.
“President Trump has revolutionized the way a president communicates,” Leavitt said in an interview last month. She added later, “I don’t wrestle with the fact that we’re infringing on the First Amendment in any way, because I don’t believe that we are.”
But Daniels called the exclusion of the wire services a “disservice to every American.”
“If you have read or watched the news, you’ve relied on the words written and transmitted immediately by wire reporters,” he said. “This change is a disservice to every American who deserves to know what their highest elected leader is up to, as quickly as possible.”
As technology changes allow information to spread quickly via the internet, the Trump White House now feels it can occasionally do without the coverage the wires provide.
Daniels said he is “disturbed” by the “new restriction” on who can cover the White House, calling it a form of retaliation for independent editorial decisions. The WHCA is calling for wires to have their Air Force One seats restored.
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The WHCA used to select pool access on its own, a power the Trump administration took away earlier this spring. Trump also skipped the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year, continuing a trend he began in his first term of missing the swanky annual event.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to the White House seeking comment.