Trump has startled the sheep in the White House Press Corp, again.
The New York Times is raising the alarm that the President-elect Trump’s incoming Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, not-so-subtly hinted during an interview with Esquire that press briefings may no longer be held in the James S. Bradley Briefing Room (named after Reagan’s Press Secretary, who was shot during Hinckley’s attempt on the President’s life, and who much later died as a result of the injury). The statement has set the White House Press Corp to fretting that they may also be evicted from the workspaces they currently occupy on the site of the old West Wing swimming pool, which with the briefing room is located in the space between the presidential residence in the East Wing, and the offices in the West Wing where President Nixon had the Brady Briefing Room, and the current workspaces, constructed in 1969 to accommodate the larger numbers of press seeking to cover the White House. Before Nixon, press briefings were generally held in the auditorium of the adjacent Harry S. Truman Building, which is the headquarters of the Department of State.
Priebus threw out the bait during the Esquire interview when he described the press as the ‘opposition party’ and said the incoming administration ‘want ’em out of the building. We are taking back the press room’. The proposed new venue is in the Eisenhower Executive Building, which is part of the White House complex, but adjacent to the West Wing, which Priebus says can accommodate four times the number of people and therefore the vastly increased number of media who are now covering the new administration.
The comments sent the White House Correspondents’ Association into an immediate tailspin, as relocation would have two significant consequences. First, the current White House Press Corp could be significantly expanded beyond the current 49 members, and, second, it would deprive those 49 members of their preferential and coveted access to the West Wing and its well-informed inhabitants.
The size of the White House press Corp has to date been dictated by the available seating in the James S. Bradley Briefing Room, and the seating allocation within the space itself is decided by the White House Correspondents’ Association. Access is also firmly controlled by the old media, as White House correspondents must first hold a congressional press pass from the Standing Committee of Correspondents, and demonstrate that they work as part of an organization whose ‘principal business is the daily dissemination of original news and opinion of interest to a broad segment of the public’ and is ‘editorially independent of any institution, foundation or interest group that lobbies the federal government’. Eligibility, and therefore access to the passes, is judged by, you guessed it, the Association. The reality is that the limited numbers of seats, and the old media’s stranglehold on the determination of eligibility, have meant that only a carefully selected chosen few have the first access to the White House press briefings and, for other media, the almost non-existent direct access to White House staff. In the business of media, those are significant advantages that have largely been concentrated in the hands of the MSM.
In another masterclass on media manipulation, Trump has thrown the old guard and the MSM into disarray by floating the possibility that they may lose their preferential access, and in so doing has provoked the media into yet another transparently self-interested tantrum that shows the MSM to be more concerned with its own vested interests than those of the electorate. After all, as Priebus says ‘if we have more people involved instead of less people involved, wouldn’t that be a good thing’; it hardly matters that a side benefit for Trump will be a markedly diminished capacity for the MSM to filter, spin and misrepresent the news to suit their preferred narrative, which is a win for the body politic, and yet another resounding loss for the MSM and its owners and controllers.
Trump is exposing the ugly soul of the MSM, and don’t they hate him for the favour, but that will be of no consequence in future if the news from the White House is directly accessible to hundreds of media organizations rather than the bought and paid-for few in the MSM. I hear that bloggers might even gain access. XYZ, you may treat this as my humble application.
Photo by Diego Cambiaso 