DONALD Trump’s White House has banned several major News organisations, including some it has openly criticised, from an off-camera briefing held by the White House press secretary on Friday, representatives of the organisations said.
- White House Press Secretary cancelled a planned on-camera briefing like those lampooned by Saturday Night Live
- Instead he hand-picked who could ask him questions in his office – banning CNN, The New York Times, the BBC and DailyMail
- Fox News – which was allowed in – reported that Spicer said: ‘We invited the people that we thought we wanted in the room’
- CNN anchor Jake Tapper has hit out at the White House, calling actions ‘petulant’
- His boss used CPAC conference to lash out at ‘fake news media’ and derided the ‘Clinton News Network’
- Defiant CNN say: ‘We’ll keep reporting regardless.’
Reporters for CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Politico, The Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed were not allowed into the session in the office of press secretary Sean Spicer.
Spicer’s off-camera briefing, or “gaggle,” replaced the usual televised daily news briefing on Friday in the White House briefing room.
He did not say why those particular news organisations were excluded, a decision which drew strong protests.
Reuters was included in the session, along with about 10 other news organisations, including Bloomberg, Breitbart and CBS.
Spicer said his team decided to have a gaggle in his office instead of a full briefing in the larger White House briefing room.
“Our job is to make sure that we’re responsive to folks in media. We want to make sure we answer your questions, but we don’t need to do everything on camera every day, he said.
Off-camera gaggles are not unusual. The White House often invites handpicked outlets in for briefings, typically for specific topics. But briefings and gaggles in the White House are usually open to all outlets and they are free to ask anything.
A pool reporter from Hearst Newspapers was included in the gaggle on Friday and was preparing a pool report for distribution to the entire press corps.
“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, said in a statement.
“We strongly protest the exclusion of The New York Times and the other news organisations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”