The Pool Filter
At approximately six-thirty on Tuesday evening, Joseph Morton, the Washington correspondent for The Dallas Morning News and the White House pooler on duty, tapped out a short email about the press being on the move and hit send. The crux of the email was fairly innocuous. It said that the White House pool, a small group of reporters designated to cover an event on behalf of the larger press corps, had been “loaded into the press vans” and was following Donald Trump “to the NRCC dinner at the National Building Museum.” But it also noted something else: “A reporter and photographer with The Associated Press were turned away from joining the pool.”
It was likely that sentence, which came after a judge had ordered the administration to restore the AP’s access, that irked the White House. That specific pool report from Morton, I’ve learned, was never distributed by the White House to news outlets subscribed to its pool report mailing list—a notable omission and a clear break from precedent.
It also wasn’t the first time this week that the White House chose to censor the pool. On Monday, Philip Wegmann, a reporter for RealClearPolitics, filed a pool report noting…
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Donald Trump at a campaign rally. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Appealing the AP’s Win: Donald Trump’s White House isn’t reversing course without a fight. One day after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore The Associated Press’ access to White House events, the government said Wednesday it will appeal the decision by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, over its refusal to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” McFadden wrote in his order Tuesday. But in the 24 hours since the ruling…
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Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
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