The Trump White House has no interest in allowing actual journalists to ask hard-hitting questions. Instead, they would rather hear from right-wing social media influencers.
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On Tuesday, during her first official appearance as press secretary, Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House wants to shake up who gets to ask questions in her daily briefings.
“The Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media who are seated in this room,” Leavitt said, adding that she took “great pride in opening up this room to new media voices to share the president’s message with as many Americans as possible.”
Among those who would now be able to get credentialed are “nontraditional journalists,” such as TikTok content producers, podcasters, and bloggers.
In theory, this is not a terrible idea… if it were done right.
Too many of the journalists who occupy seats in the cramped briefing room are not asking hard-hitting questions but rather performing for the cameras in an effort to create viral clips for social media. In addition, these reporters often chase after “shiny objects” — for example, the latest crazy thing Donald Trump said — instead of issues that are much more important.
Finally, White House correspondents are doing a poor job when it comes to following up on these issues. In other words, once they get “their” sound bite, they move on even when an issue has not been adequately addressed (or even addressed at all).
Therefore, it would be a breath of fresh air to rotate in representatives of smaller, non-legacy media outlets. For example, right now it would be great to have local outlets from California represented who have a real interest in getting questions answered about the federal response to the fires there. Or, local newspapers from Texas who will have first-hand information on the changing situation at the border and can ask informed questions about it.
That has real value.
Furthermore, it would also be good to give more questions to international media outlets apart from major wire services.
In addition, a lot of small news outlets are doing really good and important work in areas that the corporate media often ignores. However, it won’t be WhoWhatWhy’s editor-in-chief Russ Baker who will get a seat at the table.
Instead, what the Trump administration is trying to do is to drown out the voices of actual journalists by giving questions to right-wing news outlets and influencers. As Elon Musk likes to falsely claim, his social media platform X is now the world’s greatest news source, and therefore it would not be surprising to see the White House grant briefing room seats to the likes of Musk fanboys such as Mario Nawfal, “Autism Capital” or Libs of TikTok — and those people are not going to ask any relevant questions whatsoever.
All you will get from them are queries like, “Isn’t Elon the greatest?” or “Why doesn’t the Department of Defense switch to using Cybertrucks?” or “How does Donald Trump manage to stay so extremely fit?”
Just envision this exchange:
Leavitt: The next question goes to CatTurd.
CatTurd: Shouldn’t the January 6 hostages be compensated for their suffering? And when will the Capitol Police officers who assaulted them be held to account?
Leavitt: Excellent question. As you know, President Trump is a major supporter of these patriots, and we’ll have some news on this in the near future. The next question goes to X user ProudMAGAChristian84…
While that may sound ridiculous, a version of this is exactly what a White House administration wants that is trying to escape any kind of oversight and accountability.
