While all presidents tussle with the press, President Donald Trump has taken things to another level at the beginning of his second term.
Trump, still in his first 100 days in office, has kicked the historic Associated Press out of the Oval Office and off of Air Force One, seized control of the White House press pool rotation to bring in friendly outlets, and now may take over coveted seating assignments in the Brady Press Briefing Room.
All three moves generated howls of outrage from the White House Correspondents’ Association, an 800-member group that previously self-policed access.
“The White House should abandon this wrong-headed effort and show the American people they’re not afraid to explain their policies and field questions from an independent media free from government control,” the WHCA board said in reaction to seating assignment takeover news.
“If the White House pushes forward,” the board continued, “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.”
Who gets to be in the pool and who sits where in news briefings is extremely important for the media. Pool reporters get up-close access to the president, and front-row seats are almost guaranteed questions from the press secretary, while reporters in the back tend to play the role of human furniture.
But, as figures on the right often point out, the tradition of having the WHCA decide isn’t as long-standing as some like to believe.
“The decision re: who gets to sit in taxpayer provided seats in a government building should not be made by journalists,” Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary under former President George W. Bush, posted on X. “It should be made by the press sec, as was standard until 2006.”
The White House briefing room was renovated that year, which is apparently when WHCA took over. But even the room itself doesn’t date that far into history, and technological advances have profoundly affected the relationship between the president and the press.
An evolving room
The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room has become a storied place in American politics. It has been the scene of countless nightly news clips and celebrity cameos, emulated in years of Saturday Night Live sketches.
But the room as currently constructed only dates to the early 1980s and the tenure of former press secretary James Brady, who was tragically shot during an assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
A popular piece of Washington trivia holds that the briefing room used to house a swimming pool constructed for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. Less well known is the circuitous journey the room took from the pool to its blue-carpeted, theater-seated present.
President Richard Nixon decked over the pool in the early 1970s to accommodate the growing White House press corps, which previously worked elsewhere in the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door.
What Nixon came up with was an informal lounge.
Described as “English pubby,” the lounge quickly took on the disheveled look of a fraternity house as the press moved in. It did hold news briefings, however, which were first-come, first-served affairs. Reporters would grab whatever chair was available or even sit on the floor to listen to the president or the press secretary.
That arrangement lasted for 10 years through the end of the Carter administration.
It was another GOP president, Reagan, who derived order from the chaos by installing the rows of seating that are familiar today. That work began soon after he took office in 1981, creating a new dynamic in the West Wing.
“Nixon created the structure, but it was Reagan who put in the theater-style seating,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project. “That made a difference because then you began to get assigned seats.”
Craig Shirley, a conservative presidential historian who has written several books on Reagan, said he recalls that the Gipper left seating assignments up to the WHCA, though he maintains it’s the White House’s decision whether or not to do so.
Even then, seating assignments were not as big a deal as they are now because the number of reporters covering the White House was smaller, and briefings were not yet televised.
One of the biggest changes of all came during former President Bill Clinton’s administration and did not involve physical changes to the room. In January 1995, the briefings began to be televised live, starting with only the first few minutes and gradually getting longer until the full proceedings were broadcast in real-time.
With that, seating arrangements became paramount, according to Kumar, and the practice began of front-row network television reporters asking different versions of the same question to create a clip to show to their audience.
The relationship was symbiotic, as the White House needed the big television networks and newswire services such as the Associated Press to broadcast its message to the public. Hence, those organizations got the front-row seats.
Fleischer, Bush’s spokesman from 2001 to 2003, says he was the last press secretary to rearrange seats in the briefing room, demoting TIME and Newsweek because he felt they weren’t showing up to briefings often enough.
“The White House made the decision of who sits where [when I was press secretary],” he told the Washington Examiner. “They would make it in collaboration with the WHCA, but it was my decision.”
Fleischer informed the WHCA of his decision to demote those two outlets. While they complained fiercely, Fleischer said people moved on, and he was glad he did it.
“It always struck me that these are taxpayer-funded seats in a government building, and it’s just wrong to let a private-sector organization make a determination on how to use taxpayer property,” Fleischer said. “I think that’s bad government and ethically wrong.”
The briefing room got a major renovation in 2006, which appears to be when the tradition of giving WHCA complete control over seating began.
Now, just as television’s role turned front-row briefing seats into prime real estate, evolving technology may erode the importance of giving those seats to television and newswire services.
“From [the Trump administration’s] viewpoint, they have a whole set of people that they deal with who they call influencers who are important online,” Kumar said. “Each president has to deal with the technology they got elected by, and they are going to want to bring that in.”
Thus, adding Trump-friendly “New Media” seats may reflect that news dissemination can now be done largely by phone and easily accessed by the masses.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the shift will be permanent. Kumar said that even influencers tend to rely on traditional media to provide high-quality news clips and pointed to the generous staffing and commitment needed to cover the White House on a continual basis.
That’s something the WHCA mentioned when pushing back against reports of a briefing room overhaul.
“For the public to get the information it needs to understand and make decisions about the most powerful office in the world, it needs news produced by experienced, professional journalists who ask tough questions and produce fair coverage,” the board said.
Shirley said tensions between the president and the press have always existed and were, at times, even more strained than they are today. President John Adams, for example, jailed a newspaper publisher in 1799 for criticizing him. Abraham Lincoln made a similar move in 1864, ordering the imprisonment of “irresponsible newspaper reporters and editors.”
While Trump appears unlikely to repeat those moves, he has been much more aggressive in handling the press than recent predecessors, including filing lawsuits against CBS, ABC, and other news outlets. Trump has also downplayed the briefing room somewhat in favor of the Oval Office, where he often holds court after signing executive orders.
If that habit holds, his administration’s seizing control of pool rotations may prove even more consequential than any briefing room shake-up since the small group of reporters in the Oval hold the cherished task of questioning the president in close quarters.
GOP celebrates reports of White House briefing room overhaul
That arrangement may or may not last, but it reflects that Trump feels for now that he can reach his audience without the benefit of AP and the wider press contingent that fills the briefing room.
“As the media world changes, those changes are going to be reflected in the White House,” Kumar said. “Presidents are usually working with the cutting edge of publicity in their campaign, and they want to use it when they come into office.”
