The White House announced Tuesday that administration officials, not the White House Correspondents’ Association, will choose which reporters participate in pooled coverage, ramping up its aggressive stance toward reporters and essentially daring the press corps to make a move.
But what can the WHCA, which has handled the media’s access to the president for more than a century, do to fight back?
“I don’t see the genie going back in the bottle,” Stewart Powell, the organization’s president from 1998 to 1999, told NOTUS, adding that he saw little recourse for the WHCA in its current standoff with the administration.
Powell said the WHCA could take the White House to court over the decision, but even so, a protracted legal battle wouldn’t be likely to ease the apparent animosity between the WHCA and the White House, which he said has historically depended on “goodwill, tradition and collegiality.”
“We’re going to have to live with the limitations of the correspondents’ association’s relationship with the White House until there’s a change,” Powell said. “The thing to watch is whether there’s a united effort by the press corps,” which he added was “not without tools to leave the president uncovered symbolically for a while.”
Several other former senior members of the WHCA reached by NOTUS deferred to current leadership, which will lead any negotiations that may come next.
The White House is already in a legal battle with the Associated Press, which it has barred from the Oval Office for continuing to refer to the body of water that, by executive order, the U.S. now calls the Gulf of America, as the Gulf of Mexico. Trump’s transition team granted the organization’s press pool virtually no access to Trump or his goings-on at Mar-a-Lago before the president’s inauguration.
Those in Trump’s orbit immediately called the White House’s announcement the death of the WHCA. Jason Miller, who advised Trump’s campaign, posted “R.I.P. @WHCA 1914-2025” on X with a GIF of a coffin.
“For decades, a group of D.C.-based journalists, the White House Correspondents’ Association, has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during her press briefing Tuesday. Leavitt added that the changes were part of an effort to bring in “outlets to the print pool rotation who have long been denied the privilege” of presidential access.
Press pooling is the process by which, until now, White House reporters chose one of their own to represent themselves in spaces where the entire press corps cannot be accommodated. WHCA rules have generally required association members to vote on which outlets are available to pool for the rest of them, generally favoring outlets with a permanent White House presence.
The administration’s change amounts to the Trump White House deciding which outlets are allowed to provide coverage for all the others, a dramatic shift in the understanding of the press corps’ role at the White House.
In a statement after the announcement, the WHCA did little to outline its next steps.
“The White House did not give the WHCA board a heads up or have any discussions about today’s announcements,” Eugene Daniels, a Politico correspondent and the association’s current president, said in a statement. “But the WHCA will never stop advocating for comprehensive access, full transparency and the right of the American public to read, listen to and watch reports from the White House, delivered without fear or favor.”
For now, the WHCA is still planning its annual dinner — a see-and-be-seen event that draws the biggest names in the media industry and politics, as well as celebrities from film, television and music.
During his first term, Trump became the first president to not attend the organization’s annual dinners a single time, and his transition team’s sidelining of the WHCA made it clear he would likely take a similar posture during his second administration.
Even the nation’s most high-profile White House correspondents are unsure about what journalists can do about the Trump administration’s countermanding of the WHCA’s traditional control of the press pool beyond balking at it in the meantime.
“I don’t have a view at the moment of exactly what we should all do, but I think it’s important that we find a way to make clear that this represents a major departure from a long history of free press,” said Peter Baker, The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent.
Leavitt said Monday’s decision by a federal judge to not immediately reauthorize the Associated Press’ reporters’ access to certain White House events “reinforces the truth” that access to the president is “a privilege that unfortunately has only been granted to a few.” She added that the White House will continue pool rotations, but the administration would decide what outlets that would include.
That judge said the AP had not demonstrated that the ban harmed its organization, so he could not immediately order the White House to reverse it. But he did set an additional hearing for March 20 and cautioned the administration’s lawyers that First Amendment case law might not be on their side.
Daniels’ statement insisted that the WHCA had been working “for generations” to expand the organization’s membership and “to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets” in the pool.
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Emily Kennard is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Evan McMorris-Santoro, a reporter at NOTUS, contributed to this report.