The White House on Wednesday barred reporters from Reuters and several other news outlets from attending President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting, aligning with the administration’s freshly implemented media coverage policy.
An Associated Press photographer, alongside three reporters from Reuters, HuffPost, and German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, were denied entry. Meanwhile, TV crews from ABC and Newsmax, as well as correspondents from Axios, the Blaze, Bloomberg News, and NPR, were allowed to report on the gathering.
The previous day, the Trump administration revealed that it would now decide which media organizations could cover the president in more intimate settings, like the Oval Office. Historically, the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has managed the rotation of the presidential press pool, a system Reuters—an international wire service—has been part of for decades. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that while traditional outlets would still have daily access to Trump, the administration intended to shake up participation in confined spaces. The WHCA-administered pool has long enabled a mix of television, radio, wire, print, and photojournalists to cover events and distribute their reporting widely.
.@SecretaryTurner leads President Trump's cabinet in prayer as they open their first meeting of Trump 47 🙏 pic.twitter.com/I9hNH5EBAW
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 26, 2025
In response to the policy shift, the three wire services traditionally anchored in the White House pool—AP, Bloomberg, and Reuters—issued a joint statement on Wednesday. They emphasized their decades-long commitment to delivering “accurate, fair, and timely” coverage of the presidency to a diverse global audience. “Much of the White House coverage people see in their local news outlets, wherever they are in the world, comes from the wires,” the statement noted, stressing the importance of an independent press in a democracy.
HuffPost labeled the White House’s move a breach of the First Amendment’s press freedom protections. The WHCA also voiced its objections on Tuesday, decrying the administration’s new approach. The policy change comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s decision to exclude the Associated Press from the pool after it refused to adopt Trump’s rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” or revise its influential stylebook accordingly. Leavitt added that the five major cable and broadcast TV networks would retain their rotating pool seats, but the White House planned to incorporate streaming services, while maintaining slots for rotating print and radio reporters and welcoming new outlets and radio hosts into the mix.
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