The White House Briefing room, on September 19, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Graeme Sloan / Getty Images)
At a loss to assert persuasive control over the cooling economy, the dismal and nonsensical war in Iran, the runaway development of AI, or the food supply, President Donald Trump has reverted to the conservative movement’s go-to culture-war refrain: demonizing the media. In an overheated Truth Social post late last week, Trump announced that he was revoking the clearances of CNN, Politico, and MS NOW to continue attending White House briefings. Sure enough, reporters from those outlets found their access to the White House blocked when they tried to gain entry. The targeted news organizations have announced that they will sue the Trump administration for depriving them of basic First Amendment freedoms.
That action is a sound and time-honored line of defense for news outlets facing the specter of prior restraint from the executive branch. Yet Trump’s unconstitutional blacklist move—which he vowed would be but the opening salvo in his administration’s press inquisition—creates an opening to finally chloroform the desiccated ritual of the White House press briefing. The time is ripe for a full boycott of the Trump agitprop spectacle from every news organization in America. The decision by TV networks to suspend pool coverage of the White House is a good first step in this direction, but the simple truth of the matter is that the American press can only regain its independence by quitting the White House briefing room once and for all.
Like the embarrassingly compromised annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, the briefing has long outlived any notional journalistic purpose it might have once served. Going back to Ron Ziegler’s reign as enfant terrible of the messaging arm of the Nixon White House, the briefings have always functioned chiefly as culture-war theater, allowing presidents and press secretaries to browbeat correspondents for raising questions that contradict their ideological power scripts, while granting showboating network correspondents in the Sam Donaldson vein quick and viral opportunities to be seen haranguing administration flacks in a brightly lit intellectual vacuum. In many ways, Trump’s bid to limit exchanges in the briefing room to exercises in ideologically vetted rightthink is but the logical limit-case of the Faustian bargain that’s fueled the briefing room’s operations for decades.
Prior to Trump’s power grab, the Oval Office deference of the White House briefing reached its purest form in the George W. Bush White House, when the president made a point of icing out UPI correspondent Helen Thomas, a fierce critic of the invasion of Iraq, from any recognition from the podium for three years. That petulant display of favoritism spoke volumes about what the briefings were meant to accomplish: patrician indulgences for mainstream correspondents willing to toe the party line, and pariahdom for any hapless dissenter. For Bush, it worked—the White House press corps was content to sit on its hands as the administration treated Thomas like a dirty hippie, and they continued parroting the administration’s Iraq War fantasias to epically calamitous effect.
In his own vendetta against the White House press corps, Trump has merely turned this tactic up to 11, punishing any news outlet that has inadvertently stood athwart his own bottomless store of imagined grievance. (His decision to banish CNN is especially rich, since under the watch of its moronic former CEO Jeff Zucker the cable networked devoted acres of unfiltered coverage to Trump’s 2016 campaign—a virtual in-kind donation that worked out to roughly $2 billion across the industry, as other witless executives followed Zucker’s lead.)
Of course, the news organizations currently battling to reclaim their spots in the briefing room aren’t likely to sign on to the mission to abolish it altogether. Just for starters, they’d be loath to surrender the status and convenience of a perch within the White House—and TV news outfits in particular aren’t likely to surrender the cheap optics furnished by theatrical bantering with a president or his designated press flacks. But in substantive journalistic terms, there’s nothing to be gained by continuing this Kabuki theater of imperial press-corps respectability. Especially under an administration that has made the pursuit of empirical truth a de facto thought crime, no civic purpose is served by sending out network anchorbots en masse to field its lies. And once we’ve dispensed with the briefings, we can embark on a long-overdue recalibration of the logic of White House coverage.
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Instead of passively conniving in the bid to remake the White House press corps in the image of Bari Weiss’s CBS News, news organizations can hold administration officials truly accountable by drawing on contributions from people who actually know something about key policy calls. In lieu of airing an endless regress of breathless will-they-won’t-they accounts of Federal Reserve rate hikes or focusing on Wall Street’s instant reaction, press outlets could have actual economists assess the likely impact of the Fed’s decision-making in the real economy. Or as Russell Vought seeks the authority to administer and strike down research grants at the National Institute of Health, news organizations can track the fallout on a whole series of fronts, from cancer treatments to public health to longevity. Climate journalists could, at long last, be in a position to foreground the global catastrophe that the Trump administration is fomenting by treating climate change as a hoax.
Major news organizations did refuse, after all, to take part in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s effort to turn Pentagon press corps into an agitprop subsidiary, and there’s been no fall-off in crucial coverage of his woeful term in office. Indeed, GOP Representative Thomas Massie’s motion to impeach Hegseth, which spooked MAGA-prostrate House Speaker Mike Johnson into calling the chamber into an early fall recess, drew extensively on press accounts that documented Hegseth’s unfitness for office in scarifying detail, from the Defense Department’s campaign of murder in the Southern Hemisphere to the Pentagon’s shameful effort to conceal American fatalities in the Iran war. Let the members of the White House press corps heed this example, and start exercising actual journalistic independence—together with the ability to genuinely think and research for themselves.
