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Trump Administration May Kick Out Press Corps From White House
Bye, bye freedom of speech. According to three senior officials on the transition team, the Trump Administration may kick out the press corps from the White House.
If the plan goes through, one of the officials told Esquire, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center—near Lafayette Square—or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.
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“There has been no decision,” Sean Spicer, Trump’s press secretary, commented about the plan. But Spicer acknowledged that “there has been some discussion about how to do it.”
Spicer tried to cover up this blatant suppression of free speech by explaining the press room doesn’t allow for enough press. “A question is: Is a room that has forty-nine seats adequate? When we had that press conference the other day, we had thousands of requests, and we capped it at four hundred,” Spicer said. “Is there an opportunity to potentially allow more members of the media to be part of this? That’s something we’re discussing.”
However, one senior official is cutting through to explain the real reason why the press is being kicked out. “They are the opposition party,” a senior official says. “I want ’em out of the building. We are taking back the press room.”
Trump Breaking From Tradition and Freedom of Press
Reporters have had some sort of workspace at the White House since Teddy Roosevelt’s time, but the current press room is an artifact of the Richard Nixon era, the dawn of the symbiosis of the press and the modern presidency.
The “room” is actually a space containing work stations and broadcast booths, as well as the briefing area that is so familiar to viewers of presidential news conferences.
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