Eugene Daniels, the current president of the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) announced February 25 that the White House’s move to take control of who is in the press pool that travels with the president (substituting President Donald Trump’s judgment for that of the WHCA, which has ‘run’ the pool for decades) ‘suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.’
‘Since its founding in 1914, the WHCA has sought to ensure that the reporters, photographers, producers and technicians who actually do the work – 365 days of every year – decide among themselves how these rotations are operated,’ Daniels added, ‘so as to ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners.’
Daniels’ hysterical assertions that the WHCA guarantees professional ‘standards’ and ‘fairness’ came on the same day as the announcement that he was leaving his post as one of the editors of Beltway gossip site Politico to host a cable talk show at MSNBC, the same network which ousted Jonathan Capehart and Joy Reid. There is a contradiction there which I’ll leave to others.
Daniels’ assertions are absurd, of course, and bereft of even a junior-high-school-American history-course-level attempt to provide context for Trump’s decision to open the press room to new ‘new media’ and to open the traveling press pool to this ascendant ‘new media’ flourishing in The United States.
Some facts: The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room was named as such in 2000 for the press secretary wounded in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. The press room was built in 1970 at the direction of President Richard Nixon, and covered over a swimming pool built in 1934. The WHCA was founded in 1914 and the West Wing in which it — as well as the Oval Office and offices of senior officials, the Cabinet Room, the Situation Room and the White House Mess — was built in 1902.
So Daniels’ claims for turf in and access for the WHCA do not have any basis in the Constitution or the First or 14th amendments. Daniels’ claims are that the practices that grew up — and which have evolved — over time under the direction of legacy media should always remain fixed.
These arguments are levied despite the fact he worked until recently for a gossip sheet that didn’t exist a quarter-century ago and is jumping ship from there to a sinking cable network that is as shrill in its daytime, nightly and weekend coverage as its audience is as small as that of a single preseason NFL game television. Like I said: Absurd.
So why the outrage? It is the expected reaction of a guild losing its right to license membership. Chuck Todd, the former moderator of NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ made some excellent and valid points about the cost of pool coverage, which legacy networks traditionally bore and which will either have to be reasonably apportioned among journalists in the pool or picked up in whole by the White House out of the president’s budget just as the president’s budget pays for the press room.
But it is basic First Amendment ‘black letter law’ that the government may not engage in viewpoint discrimination. So, the president cannot pick reporters for the pool based only on their political point of view. And he did not purport to do so. What he and his team are doing is breaking up an aristocracy of media that depends on Beltway profile.
This will be a departure for the country as White House-based coverage of the president has been a game rigged by that aristocratic guild, which itself has shifted left, left, left over the last many decades.
To be sure, there are a few conservatives in the press room and some center-right folks in the pool. But the collective legacy media moved inexorably to the left over the past 50 years, beginning with Nixon’s 1968 election and the Democrats’ U-turn on Vietnam.
The gap that opened between legacy elites and ordinary Americans evolved from ‘hidden’ to ‘open’ and indeed is now flaunted, (The WHCA annual dinner, ‘The Nerd Prom,’ is exhibit A.)
So Daniels’ claims for turf in and access for the WHCA do not have any basis in the Constitution or the First or 14th amendments. Daniels’ claims are that the practices that grew up — and which have evolved — over time under the direction of legacy media should always remain fixed.
Now Trump is breaking the guild and I and most alternative media of the center-left and center-right are not unhappy at all with the new developments (and I have never wanted nor will ever want, a seat in the press room or on the plane.) Most competitors of legacy media just want a level playing field.
There is zero reason for there to be a press room anywhere. There is zero reason for a WHCA. And goodness knows there is zero reason for ‘the nerd prom.’ It is time to fairly and, on a rotation, perhaps leavened by lottery, to admit journalists to the press room and into the ‘pool.’
Members of the guild: Recall the lesson of the late, great writer Michael Kelly: Journalism is a craft, not a profession. Anyone can practice it. Some are better than others. A few, like the Washington Post’s Dan Balz, are examples of excellence and probity. Study the greats. Emulate them. The byline is the brand, and the brand doesn’t mean a damn.
Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.