The incoming Trump White House, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt, is signaling that it wants to revamp the press briefing room. This is an outstanding idea.
Numerous studies show a strained relationship between the national media and conservatives, leading many observers to hope the second Trump administration will proactively ensure that the White House briefing room brings balanced voices to express voters’ concerns.
The first Trump administration was marked by an unusually adversarial relationship with the national media, including inside the White House’s iconic James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.
President-elect Donald Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, told me that the Trump White House continued a decades-old, informal tradition of allowing the White House Correspondents Association to determine seating assignments in the briefing room.
In the second Trump term, this could all change—for the better.
The White House Correspondents Association has no ownership over federal property, wields no leasehold interest over the briefing room, and it doesn’t determine who is trespassing on the property—which is a government site dedicated to public use.
Five or 10 years ago, Spicer said, far fewer conservative media outlets existed.
“It was all variations of the same left-wing outlets,” he said. “I think conservative media has grown and proliferated so much that there are now more opportunities for the press office to involve more voices.”
Ari Fleischer, first press secretary for President George W. Bush, studied the composition of the press corps for his 2022 book “Suppression, Deception, Snobbery, and Bias: Why the Press Gets So Much Wrong?and Just Doesn’t Care.”
The White House briefing room’s seats are occupied by Democrats at a ratio of 12 to 1, Fleischer reported.
“No matter how you cut it,” he wrote, “the White House briefing room does not look, sound, or register to vote like America.”
Author Steve Krakauer, a veteran journalist, unraveled just how deeply embedded liberal media bias runs in his recent book “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People.”
One example Krakauer gives is “geographic bias,” a problem identified by Pew Research Center that proves Middle America is grossly underrepresented in journalism.
According to Pew, which analyzed U.S. Census Bureau figures, those from the South comprise 37% of all American workers, yet make up only 21% of those who work in internet news publishing and broadcasting.
Workers from the Midwest are even less proportionally represented, comprising 22% of the American workforce overall but just 10% of online journalists.
In the Trump White House briefing room of 2017, Spicer worked to rectify this geographic imbalance. He made history as the first White House press secretary to bring in Skype. He invited local reporters nationwide, along with bloggers and radio personalities, to participate in briefings.
Spicer said the local reporters would ask about water rights, job creation, transportation issues—unlike the in-person, front-row White House press corps and its obsession with alleged “Russia collusion.”
Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer who used to be on the Federal Election Commission, told me his read of the courts is that the White House isn’t required to give access to reporters.
But if it grants access, because of the First Amendment the White House can’t deny access arbitrarily for less than a compelling reason and must set up the rules ahead of time.
Von Spakovsky, who now manages The Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative as a senior legal fellow at the think tank, cites the problematic behavior in the White House briefing room of CNN reporter Jim Acosta and Playboy correspondent Brian Karem.
“I would have rewritten my rules to very specifically cover that kind of rude and inconsiderate behavior,” von Spakovsky said. “And I think if they’d had the rules like that, even if they didn’t win in the District Court, I think they would eventually win in the Court of Appeals and, if they had to, at the U.S. Supreme Court.”
As a White House correspondent for JustTheNews.com in 2020, I attended press briefings and asked Trump questions.
I gained access to the briefing room (along with One America News reporter Chanel Rion) not through the White House Correspondents Association but as a guest of then-press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
It quickly became abundantly clear that the objective of the White House press corps was to attack Trump and his policies, not seek objectivity.
The opposite became true with the Biden-Harris administration, during which a biased White House press corps covered for the president’s cognitive decline.
The Daily Signal’s Rob Bluey reported last year that the number of reporters with access to the White House dropped by 31% under Joe Biden—442 fewer reporters had a coveted “hard pass.” It was the result of new rules some interpreted as targeting conservative media.
This should change come Jan. 20.
The legacy press claims to care for democracy, but ignores its Latin root word demos, which means “people.” And if the legacy press ignores the worldview of half the country in the White House press room, it’s time to bring more balance.
Carrie Sheffield is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
