WASHINGTON: The unthinkable happened at a Friday afternoon news briefing when an aide to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer denied access to reporters from CNN, The New York Times, Politico, The Hill, the BBC, the Daily Mail, Buzzfeed, the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News and The Huffington Post.

The White House said only those previously confirmed could attend the briefing. The Associated Press and Time magazine, which were allowed to enter, boycotted out of solidarity.

Media organisations came forward to defend press freedom. “We are concerned by the decision to bar reporters from a press secretary briefing. The US should be promoting press freedom and access to information,” said Joel Simon, Executive Director for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The US-based media advocacy group also objected to Trump’s call to stop the media from using anonymous sources. “President Trump’s calls for an end to anonymous sources is alarming. It is not the job of political leaders to determine how journalists should conduct their work, and sets a terrible example for the rest of the world, where sources often must remain anonymous to preserve their own lives,” the CPJ chief said.

Name the sources

Earlier on Friday, President Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland journalists should not be allowed to use anonymous sources. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name. Let their name be put out there. Let their name be put out,” he said, earning warm applause from the conservative crowd. “A source says that Donald Trump is a horrible, horrible human being. Let them say it to my face,” said the president as the crowd clapped. “Let there be no more sources. And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake, phony, fake,” said Trump as the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

He told his supporters a few days ago he called the fake news the enemy of the people because “they are. They are the enemy of the people. But instead of reporting it accurately, the media twisted his words “and all of a sudden the story became the media is the enemy. They take the word ‘fake’ out.” Such journalists, he said, were terribly dishonest people who were doing “a tremendous disservice to our country and to our people.” He further said once these “very dishonest people” were stopped from using anonymous sources, “you will see stories dry up like you’ve never seen before.”

The US president said that such journalists were not only dishonest but they were also “very smart” and “very cunning” and that’s why they should not be allowed to “use sources. They should put the name of the person.”

And as some reporters returned to the White House from the CPAC conference, they realised the administration was ready to put the president’s words into action. About a dozen of them were stopped from attending the briefing and those who did, learned from the White House press secretary that the Trump administration would relentlessly counter coverage it considered inaccurate. “We’re going to aggressively push back,” he said. “We’re just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there.”

Later, a White House official rejected the suggestion that the administration wanted to keep its critics out. He pointed out some of the invitees represented organisations that have been the most critical of Trump in their reporting.“We invited the pool so everyone was represented,” deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders wrote in an email. “We decided to add a couple of additional people beyond the pool for an expanded pool. Nothing more than that.”

Dean Baquet, editor of The New York Times, disagreed. “Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” he said in a statement. “Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest.”

“This is an undemocratic path that the administration is travelling,” said Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post. “There is nothing to be gained from the White House restricting the public’s access to information.”

US National Press Club President Jeffrey Ballou said he found the action “deeply disturbing and completely unacceptable” and accused the White House of “running a campaign against a constitutionally enshrined free and independent press. The Trump administration wanted to impose an “undemocratic, un-American and unconstitutional censorship,” he said.

Trump was anonymous source

The US media also rejected Trump’s suggestion that journalists should not be allowed to use anonymous sources. The Washington Post pointed out “Trump himself has served as an anonymous source on occasion and in the early 1990s occasionally posed as a fake anonymous source to promote himself.”

The Post also noted the action came a few hours after senior White House officials demanded anonymity from reporters in a briefing to criticise a CNN report that Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had asked FBI officials to publicly disavow stories about Trump campaign aides’ contacts with Russian sources.

Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2017