White House Correspondents Association says Trump administration is trying to pressure reporters
Source: CNN Business
Updated 3:16 PM EDT, Mon March 31, 2025
CNN — The White House Correspondents’ Association says the Trump administration should abandon its “wrong-headed effort” to take control of the press briefing room seating chart. In a memo to its nearly 900 members on Monday, the association charged the White House with trying to “exert pressure on journalists over coverage they disagree with.”
Axios and CNN reported Sunday that the White House intends to take charge of the seating assignments, bigfooting the association, which has managed the matter for decades.
“The most obvious end result of this reported plan is the punishment, not elevation, of journalists,” the association’s president Eugene Daniels wrote Monday. “It’s the same at the Pentagon, where the administration removed longstanding outlets whose coverage they disagreed with for other outlets that did not regularly cover the building.”
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Trump and his press aides have shown a clear desire to do away with White House press corps norms and traditions. The actions have all trended in the same direction: Toward promoting pro-Trump friends and punishing perceived foes.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/31/media/white-house-correspondents-association-trump/index.html
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Great statement by these journalists
Link to tweet
“The collective weight of the administration's actions - retaliatory access bans, coercive regulatory investigations, frivolous lawsuits against the press, defunding of public broadcasting, dismantling of international broadcasting, physical restrictions on journalists, personal verbal attacks on reporters, assaults on the media in official White House press releases and social media posts, the arrest of journalists, and the pardoning of those who committed violence against the press - represent the most systematic and comprehensive assault on freedom of the press by a sitting American president.”
The letter proceeds to list all of his attacks.
