President Trump and his media team are aiming to make it easier to “exact punishment” on journalists by taking control of the seating chart in the White House press briefing room, the White House Correspondents’ Association warned on Monday.
The complaint follows an Axios report that the Trump Administration is looking to take the responsibility of assigning seats away from the WHCA, which has decided where reporters sit in the press briefing room since 1981. The move would come after the Trump Administration already took one responsibility away from the WHCA in February — assigning which reporters are part of the White House press pool.
On Monday, the WHCA said another encroachment by the Trump Administration on its responsibilities would further damage the relationship it has with the White House.
“If the White House pushes forward, it will become even more clear that the administration is seeking to cynically seize control of the system through which the independent press organizes itself, so that it is easier to exact punishment on outlets over their coverage,” the WHCA board said in a statement.
The board added: “The most obvious end result of this reported plan is the punishment, not elevation, of journalists. It’s the same at the Pentagon, where the administration removed longstanding outlets whose coverage they disagreed with for other outlets that did not regularly cover the building.”
Trump’s media team, led by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, has already looked to punish outlets that disagree with the administration, the WHCA argued.
It pointed to the ongoing Trump-Associated Press feud, where the AP has been blocked from certain parts of the White House over its refusal to use the term “Gulf of America,” following President Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico on government documents. The AP has said its free speech rights are being violated, while the Trump Administration has said no outlet is guaranteed to ask the president questions. A federal judge is now weighing the arguments made by both sides.
The Trump Administration wants to “obscure” its battle with legacy media outlets, the WHCA further stated on Monday, by “suggesting that they are ushering in new media outlets” that have been excluded by the WHCA. Leavitt has opened the press briefing room up to new outlets as part of its rotating “new media” seat, where podcasters and non-mainstream outlets have been included since January.
The WHCA said it reached out to the Trump press team on Sunday about having a meeting on Monday about the potential changes, but it did not say whether a meeting is actually taking place.
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