Trump Briefing Begins With Pledge To Boost Outside Media

Donald Trump’s “flood the zone” approach will extend — literally — to the White House briefing room.

In her first appearance from the White House briefing room podium, press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a jam-packed room of reporters that the administration intended to dramatically increase the group of journalists with White House access, making clear that the administration’s approach to the press corps will be far different.

“The Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities, not just the legacy media that are seated in this room,” said Leavitt, who encouraged “anyone in this country” doing “legitimate” reporting to apply for press credentials.

Leavitt, at 27 the youngest person to hold her job, announced that the Trump administration plans to reinstate the hard passes of some 440 journalists who saw their badges revoked — or, as she put it, “wrongly revoked” — by the Biden administration in the summer of 2023.

The decision to open up the White House complex to far more journalists from less traditional outlets and even independent bloggers and influencers, Leavitt said, would allow the administration to better reach a public that is fast shifting away from major newspapers and television networks for information.

It also allows the Trump team to circumnavigate the influence of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which still determines the briefing room seating chart but has never controlled who does and does not receive a hard pass. The administration has not challenged WHCA by attempting to refashion that chart, determining the distribution of the 49 seats in the room. But Leavitt announced that Trump was rebranding a row of seats typically used by staff at the front of the room as “new media” seats.

And instead of calling on the Associated Press for the first question, a long-held tradition, Leavitt allowed the two individuals in those seats — Mike Allen of Axios and Matt Boyle of Breitbart — to go ahead of the AP’s Zeke Miller.

As she took questions, Leavitt made a point of bouncing from network correspondents in the front row to reporters in the back of the room and those standing in the aisles, some of whom thanked her for calling on them.

Miller, as AP correspondents have traditionally done at a new press secretary’s first briefing, asked Leavitt if she felt her job was to deliver the truth to the public or to please the president, even if that meant obfuscating or misleading journalists in the room.

“I commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day. I commit to speaking on behalf of the president,” she responded, adding that she would not be shy about pushing back when the White House felt the press was misleading the public.

“We will call you out when we feel your reporting is wrong,” Leavitt said. But she added: “I will hold myself to the truth and we expect everyone in this room to do the same.”