NYTimes Spikes TWH Audio For Podcast Use

The New York Times said Tuesday that it complied with a White House request not to publish audio from an interview with a top aide to President Trump even though Stephen Miller's comments were on the record.

According to The Hill, the newspaper said that reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear interviewed Miller, a staunch supporter of the president's immigration policies, for a story that was published in the paper's print and online editions over the weekend. The Times had also planned to use audio from  the Miller interview for its podcast The Daily, which is downloaded more than 1 million times a day.

Miller was directly quoted several times throughout the story, which focused exclusively on a "zero tolerance" immigration policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that has resulted in the separations of thousands of undocumented children from their parents at the border. But the White House later said it was "uncomfortable" with audio from the interview being made public, and claimed the interview was only supposed to be used in print and online form.

The Times relented, saying that the ground rules for the interview were not clear.

This is rather explicit acknowledgement by the NYT that it's willing to make sacrifices to preserve its access to senior people within the White House. Is that access worth it? Maybe—they get a lot of scoops! But let's not pretend there aren't trade-offs. https://t.co/VJe4jrQixX

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 19, 2018