The president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, is considering reducing the weight that traditional media have in the White House press room to give access to “independent” reporters, his son Donald Trump Jr. announced this Tuesday.
In his podcast, Trump Jr. pointed out that maintaining the presence of traditional media just because “they have been there a long time” does not seem like a good way to proceed.
“Why not open it to people who have a larger audience and more followers?” added the first-born son of the future president, according to whom his father thought this change was a “great idea.”
The New York tycoon, according to his son, is considering this possibility because of how the media has behaved towards him.
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The New York Times, in his opinion, has been “averse to everything and is functioning as the marketing arm of the Democratic Party.”
The White House, however, does not generally decide who gets a seat in the briefing room. That task falls to the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA), which brings together the journalists who cover this institution and which, according to its website, has assigned seats since the Ronald Reagan administration.
The room has only 49 seats, all allocated to a specific medium. Having an assigned seat makes it easier to direct questions to the spokesperson, although any reporter with the proper credentials, issued by the White House Press Office, can attend press briefings standing.
The first row is allocated to The Associated Press agency, which, by tradition, always has the first question at press conferences, as well as correspondents from large television networks such as NBC, Fox, CBS, ABC and CNN.
The second row is occupied by important newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other prominent media.
Under Joe Biden’s administration, press conferences have been almost daily, as they were under Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
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However, during his first term in the White House, Trump, who has maintained a conflictive relationship with the press and has called the media “enemies of the people” and “fake news,” ordered his communications team to break with that. tradition.
As a result, press conferences became sporadic under Trump, depending on which press secretary was in office at the time. In fact, a record of more than 300 days without appearances by the spokesperson was established between March 2019 and January 2020.
With information from EFE
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