In an emotional Tuesday afternoon meeting, outgoing 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens reportedly expressed concerns to staff that the venerable news program was losing its independence, a scenario playing out as CBS News parent Paramount is reportedly in talks to settle a lawsuit of dubious merit brought by President Donald Trump. “The company,” Owens told his team, according to the Times, “is done with me.”
In four days, CBS News staffers will gather for a more festive occasion: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The network is hosting a Saturday pre-party with Politico, one of a flurry of fêtes and boozy brunches sponsored by news outlets and talent agencies that will take place at Washington hotels and hot spots, ambassadors’ residences, and backyard gardens. But alongside this year’s celebration of the First Amendment are reminders of just how much press freedom is being challenged in a second Trump term, involving everything from White House access restrictions to free speech threats.
“We’re in for a wild ride in terms of the games they’re going to play,” one political reporter told me, referring to the administration. The “guardrails are gone” in this second term, the reporter added, and as a result, “the solidarity of the press corps is going to be really tested.”
Trump is skipping Saturday’s dinner at the Washington Hilton, just as he did during his first term. The WHCA weathered such snubs in the past, but this time around, the organization is grappling with an administration that’s already taken away one of the journalist-led group’s primary functions and could nab a second. In February, the White House indicated that it would move to handpick the media outlets participating in the daily press pool, a group of journalists who cover the president’s words and actions in smaller settings for the news media, including when the president travels out of Washington. Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News reporter and a member of the WHCA board, told Vanity Fair that she was specifically concerned about the administration taking control of the press pool, saying, “I’m not sure the administration was thinking about the long run when they made [the decision].
“You don’t want access to the leader of the free world to be dependent on favorable coverage,” Heinrich added. “That’s the whole reason why the WHCA self-organized, beginning back in the early 1900s. It’s just not what America stands for.”
A major source of tension is a continued court battle playing out between the Associated Press and the White House, which banned the outlet from the press pool in February after the AP’s refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its coverage. The AP sued the administration in response, arguing that the ban raised questions about press freedom. On April 8, a federal judge ruled in favor of the newswire, finding the ban in violation of the First Amendment and ordering the White House to reinstate access.
Just days later, the White House said that it was eliminating the rotating press pool spot for three major newswires, which includes the AP along with Reuters and Bloomberg News. The AP filed a motion asking the court to enforce the injunction requiring the administration to allow the AP back into the pool rotation, which was denied by a federal judge in Washington. Judge Trevor N. McFadden categorized the new policy as “facially neutral,” adding that he would need time to determine whether it resulted in “viewpoint discrimination.” This past Saturday, the AP had finally made its way back into the official press pool; however, Trump had no public events on his schedule.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins called the White House’s fight with the AP “obviously retaliatory in nature,” and a “slippery slope” for the administration to start heading down. The network’s chief White House correspondent, who previously served as the WHCA president, is all for expanding the press pool, “but when you start taking people away, or removing people or banning them, that is where it’s dangerous territory. That’s kind of the moment we’re at now,” she tells me.
Meanwhile, in the White House briefing room, “officials have made room for a new cohort of more partisan attendees, like right-wing podcasters, who often ask less-adversarial questions than traditional journalists,” as The New York Times recently put it. (Still, as Paul Farhi points out, it’s the more mainstream news outlets who are churning out the biggest Trump 2.0 scoops.) The White House is reportedly considering shaking up the seating arrangements in the briefing room, which had also long been handled by the WHCA.