Cristian Farias:

Welcome to The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump vs. The First Amendment. I’m your host, Christian Farias. Freedom of the press is under attack like never before, and the journalists and news organizations that are helping to make sense of the chaos of the second Trump presidency are on the front lines. Their fight isn’t just to keep everyone informed while making sense of the fire hose of information and misinformation coming from the White House. But under this administration, they’re tasked with a second job, to protect themselves from retaliation by the president of the United States. This week we’re going to learn about the impact the White House’s decision to bar the Associated Press from the press pool has had on journalists and the freedom of the press and the downstream effect these actions have had on our democracy.

S.V. Dáte:

They’ve packed the press pool, not just the briefing, the press pool, with news outlets that are not news outlets. They’re basically Trump apologists and sycophants. Some of these influencers have zero experience of that. None. Sometimes they don’t even write a story, they’ll just go and post memes on the internet based on what they saw. That’s not journalism.

Cristian Farias:

That’s SV Dáte. A longtime White House correspondent who is a member of the White House press pool. He’ll tell us all about how it works and how Trump has kneecapped, how an independent press covers his official movements, appearances and statements. And I’ll also speak to Katie Fallow from the Knight Institute, who will give us an update on the Associated Press’s lawsuit against the White House and the legal issues surrounding it. But before that, the news.

The trial for AAUP v. Rubio, the big challenge to the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining and deporting pro-Palestinian student advocates continues in Boston. Lots has happened since the trial kicked off last week. Most notably, the government has invoked a series of privileges to keep some information secret and off the public record. High-ranking state department officials, as well as some of the ICE agents who oversaw the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil among others, provided key testimony that made clear how unusual and top-down this deportation campaign was. The trial is set to wrap very soon, but the judge is not expected to rule right away.

In an exclusive essay in Vanity Fair, Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student targeted for deportation because of an op-ed she wrote in the university’s newspaper, wrote at length about what it was like to be disappeared to a detention center in Louisiana and the harrowing she saw and experienced there. She writes, “Writing is the heart of freedom of expression. Unbelievably, the single opinion piece published in our student newspaper would lead to my arrest and detention. It’s a beautiful, powerful piece. I hope you read it.” In response to the protests that rocked the lay last month, a judge ordered the LAPD to stop shooting journalists, covering protests with phone projectiles, flashbang grenades, and tear gas. These so-called less lethal munitions have resulted in serious injuries with several journalists being hospitalized.

The temporary restraining order also stops police from blocking journalists from newsgathering during curfew hours and areas closed off to the general public. And the Senate voted to approve a $9 billion rescission bill, which would claw back $1.1 billion previously appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which includes NPR and PBS. It’s not over until it’s over, and this bill now heads to the house for approval. But as we set in episode four, this rescission package would deal an all but deadly blow to public broadcasting, especially those local stations in news deserts that rely on public media for everything from educational television to life-saving weather reports.

With the fate of public broadcasting hanging by a thread, and I can’t believe I just said that, it’s as good a time as any to talk about the other threat to press freedom, the future and present of the White House press pool. And on today’s show to talk about the legal issues surrounding this legal confrontation between the Associated Press and the White House is Katie Fallow. She’s the deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. And Katie, you’re the Bully’s Pulpit first ever expert guest who joins us a second time. Congratulations for that and thanks again for your expertise.

Katie Fallow:

Thank you, Christian. I’d like to thank my family for supporting me on my journey to become a repeat guest on the Bully’s Pulpit.

Cristian Farias:

That’s wonderful. Now, let’s talk about one of the biggest press freedom cases of the second Trump era, and that is the Associated Press’s lawsuit against the White House over the president’s decision to rename that large mass of water between Mexico and the US. But the case isn’t about the renaming per se. Tell me about this case and how did it come about.

Katie Fallow:

Yeah. So what happened was in February of this year, the White House started to exclude the Associated Press from covering events in places like the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One. And the tradition that’s been in existence for decades is that there’s the White House press pool, which allows selected journalists from selected news outlets to cover events that they’re invited to cover by the president. And the Associated Press started to be excluded from these events. And the White House made it very clear that the reason for their exclusion was because the Associated Press as part of its style guide, was going to continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press would continue to note that President Trump had changed the name, but it refused to just say Gulf of America, the president’s chosen term.

Cristian Farias:

And just for the clarity of everyone, the Associated Press Style Guide is basically this book, right, where if you have a question about how something is written, how it’s spelled, whether it’s capitalized or not, whether you have to use acronyms, you go to the guide and it tells you how to write that particular place. And because it’s an international news service and they service other reporters scattered throughout the world, they need it to be very clear in how to communicate certain things. Now, tell me, how does the Trump administration decision violate the First Amendment?

Katie Fallow:

First of all, this is classic First Amendment retaliation, essentially removing a benefit or penalizing a speaker in some way based on their viewpoint or editorial decisions. And you can see this in stark terms, where the White House is basically saying, “You’re no longer going to be able to participate in this press pool coverage as you have done for decades and decades because we want to control the speech that you make outside of these spaces. And we also maybe want to control the speech that other people use,” because as you mentioned, a lot of people follow the AP’s style guidelines. And it also sends a chilling effect to other journalists essentially saying, “If you don’t cover the White House in the way that the White House wants, you’re going to be penalized.” So that’s retaliation.

It also violates the First Amendment under something called the public forum doctrine, which the Knight Institute, we’ve litigated this a lot. And what the public forum doctrine says is when the government opens up a space that it controls or owns for members of the public or members of the press to engage in their own speech in terms of the harms, first of all, the AP is a wire service engaged in up-to-the-minute reporting, and without being allowed into the press pool ever, it has to rely on the reporting of other press outlets. And that interferes with its editorial judgments because of course each journalist who’s in these smaller spaces is making their decisions about what photos to take or what questions to ask or what notes to make in terms of observations of what’s going on. From the AP’s perspective, I think hurts them in a business sense because of course, these journalistic outlets are competitors with one another.

Cristian Farias:

Now, not long after the case was filed, the Knight Institute filed a friend of the court brief with the district court, and later on in the case, the Knight Institute filed a second brief. Can you tell me about these two briefs and why you filed them?

Katie Fallow:

Yeah. So these briefs are also known as amicus briefs or some people say amicus. I can go back and forth.

Cristian Farias:

I’m Team Amicus myself.

Katie Fallow:

Okay. Amicus briefs. The judge in this case, Judge McFadden invited other people to submit these kinds of briefs, and the Knight Institute filed a brief on its own behalf. And the reason why we filed it is because we thought it would assist the court in describing why these actions violated the public forum doctrine. And the AP in its own motion for preliminary injunction and in the complaint was really focusing more on the First Amendment retaliation claim.

So after we submitted that brief and a bunch of other organizations submitted their own briefs, the judge put out an order essentially saying, “I really like these briefs. I’d also like to hear about any originalist perspective on whether the government can exclude certain journalists or certain newspapers from a government space based on viewpoint.” So we worked with a number of scholars, including Genevieve Lakier, who was the author of this brief, but we represented them as their attorneys. And we submitted a brief that really talked about, not really an originalist perspective, but historical evidence of what the founders thought about what the First Amendment meant. And overall, it showed that the founders absolutely believed that the First Amendment meant that the press cannot be discriminated against or excluded from certain coverage just based on their point of view or how they’re covering certain events.

Cristian Farias:

In April, the court ruled in the AP’s favor stating, quote, “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists, be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere, it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.” End quote. Now, that’s a great ruling, but it was very short-lived. How did the Trump White House respond to the ruling and what happened after that?

Katie Fallow:

Yes, that’s correct. I will add right now that the government keeps saying that the AP will still have an ability to cover the White House or certain White House events under a new policy that it instituted after this lawsuit was filed. And there’s been some disagreement with the parties about whether that’s in fact the case. But the Court of Appeals in this case disagreed with Judge McFadden. It did not think that the AP was likely to win on its First Amendment claims either under the public forum doctrine or under retaliation. So it was a two to one ruling, so one of the judges disagreed, but the effect of the Court of Appeals decision is that the White House can discriminate against the AP. And since then, the AP has gone back to all of the judges on the DC circuit and asked them to overturn that earlier panel’s decision. So we’re just in a state of waiting to see what the bigger group of judges on the DC circuit the Court of Appeals does.

Cristian Farias:

And I should note that two judges that ruled against Judge McFadden and the AP are two Trump appointed judges on this appeals court. And the Fuller Court, the full DC circuit is majority Democratic appointees. So who knows what’s going to happen, but the fact remains, the AP is still in a state of limbo and is still being harmed.

Katie Fallow:

Exactly.

Cristian Farias:

Now, I’m curious if you can reflect on this case and why people should still care about the AP and what happens to its future in the press pool.

Katie Fallow:

I think it’s of great importance. It’s obviously very important to AP and AP’s reporters because it’s hampering their ability to do their jobs. But from a First Amendment perspective, what’s even more troubling is the message that this action sends to other members of the White House press corps or other journalistic outlets, essentially saying if you engage in coverage or make statements that either the president doesn’t like or the White House doesn’t like, you could lose access to reporting, you could lose access to being able to ask the president questions.

And what is important about preventing viewpoint discrimination is to make sure that a variety of perspectives are represented in the press corps and that you have a truly independent press. And I think this really poses a threat to this. When it first happened, I think there was someone who wrote in the New York Times about how some of this reminded them of when they were in Russia and covering Putin earlier on in his presidency and when he kicked out a correspondent from the Kremlin. And at the time, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal, but it was the first step towards a not independent press corps in Russia, and it’s very worrisome that we might be headed down that road.

Cristian Farias:

Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director for the Knight First Amendment Institute. It’s been great talking to you.

Katie Fallow:

Thank you so much.

Cristian Farias:

What’s happening to the Associated Press is only the tip of the spear in this new abnormal for the president’s relationship with the reporters who follow his every move, but there’s so much more that the public doesn’t see. And with us to talk about the White House press pool and its current state and how things are different these days, I have with us SV Dáte. SV is a senior White House correspondent for HuffPost. SV, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

S.V. Dáte:

Hey. Well, thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it.

Cristian Farias:

Now, you and I intersected at HuffPost during the 2016 presidential campaign and then the early days of the first Trump presidency. So we have this history. Can you tell us and tell me what exactly is the White House press pool and how does it work?

S.V. Dáte:

Well, the White House press pool has existed for decades, and it’s been run not by the White House, but by the White House Correspondents’ Association, which is kind of the professional group of reporters who cover the White House and executive agencies, and it’s self-governing and we have a board and we have elected officers, et cetera. And they had been cooperating with the White House for decades on the number of people who would be in the daily pool, how many would be on the travel pool, like on Air Force One, et cetera. And the reason for this is there are oftentimes that a president is doing something, meeting with the cabinet, bringing in foreign leaders into the Oval Office, traveling on the plane and so on, where it’s just not practical to invite in every single reporter who’s covering the White House. That can be hundreds of people depending on the time of year, depending on the administration and so on.

What there’s been, I carefully am saying in the past tense here, because we can get to why it’s different, but there had been a rotation of people, 13 typically who are in the small confined room pool, which is like the Oval Office or Air Force One, representatives of print media, of TV, radio, the wire services. And the idea is we all work together. So whatever the president says, the questions that are asked, sometimes we get the opportunity to ask questions. Whatever is said is not exclusive to the person who asked it, but it’s shared by everyone in the pool and then everyone who covers the White House. That was key, right?

I mean, you go into that pool and that material is not yours. It belongs to every single reporter in the White House press corps, which is hundreds. And it’s your obligation whether you are the print pooler for the day as I am about once a month, or if you are one of the wire service reporters or one of the producers for TV, you all work together. So if I miss a quote, if I’m far from something and the person with the TV crew with the boom mic has it, and I ask, “Hey, I’d like to listen to that to make sure I got what he said properly,” they absolutely 100% play it back for you because again, this is not a competitive situation. This is cooperative. That’s how it was, and things are very, very different now.

Cristian Farias:

That’s a great way to set the stage. One thing that I want to pull a threat from what you just said is that it’s very collaborative. It’s almost as if you’re not in competition with each other, but the news in a way, I guess outside of the press pool, it is competitive. And if you’re in the press briefing room, which is a little different, you do kind of want to get that question that no one else has asked before. And I’m curious if you can kind of distinguish the two a little bit for people who may not be familiar with that dynamic.

S.V. Dáte:

Sure. The briefing room, that is not pooled. I mean, everyone has the ability to go there. Whether you have a seat in that room or not regularly, you have the ability to come in and take an empty seat or stand on the sides, and whether the press [inaudible 00:18:24] calls on you or not, there’s no guarantees for any of that, but that’s entirely different. That’s like basically a daily press conference, and those are never pooled unless, again, they happen to occur on Air Force One or in the Oval Office or something like that. So while everyone’s competitive with each other, TV stations competitive with each other and with print, et cetera and so on, we understand that there is a collective need for getting accurate information in those situations where not everyone can be there. So if it’s NBC’s turn to be in the pool, they should not have a competitive advantage that particular day over CBS or ABC or CNN, and they rotate by the day.

So everyone shares that video, everyone shares that audio, and in print, everyone shares what’s in those pool reports. And by the way, if I’m the print pooler on any given day and Trump says something about tariffs, I can’t write a story based on that for HuffPost until I have sent that material out to everybody. So everyone has the chance to write the same material as the print pooler does because that material does not belong to me. It does not belong to HuffPost. It belongs to everyone who covers the White House and subscribes to those pool reports. By the way, we’re not the only group that has pools. Pentagon has pools. When the defense secretary’s traveling, there’s a pool that travels with them on that plane and they share that material with everyone else. And that’s how it’s been again for decades, and it’s worked.

Cristian Farias:

You’ve been a White House correspondent now for nearly a decade, but you’ve also covered the White House during prior stints at other news organizations. Now let’s get specific, how is covering President Donald Trump different from other presidents you’ve covered?

S.V. Dáte:

First thing, he came from the entertainment world. So he’s a showman, and he continues to be. Just look at this tariff stuff. A normal president or a normal human being would make agreements with other countries as to trade. If you feel you have an unfair trade imbalance, you’d work that out. You’d negotiate about it. But Trump doesn’t do that. He just makes crazy statements on social media sometimes, sometimes in real life at news conferences or press availabilities, and then that is never the final word. You don’t know what value to put on anything that he says because nothing he says matters because it can change hours later or days. So it’s entertainment, it’s for the ratings. And he said this himself. Look at the ratings this thing got. My news conferences get great ratings because you never know if you’re going to start a war with somebody over until I imagine slight. That’s why. This is not a sane way to run a country, but that’s what the voters wanted.

Other presidents did not do that. And what has happened over the last 10 years, Biden got criticized for not constantly going out and talking to the media. Well, you know what? George W. Bush didn’t do that. Obama didn’t do that. A press conference was a relatively rare thing. I think the last person who had them semi-regularly was probably George HW Bush. Clinton liked to talk to the press quite a bit too, but nothing like Trump. Trump is in your face all the time, every day, and that’s what’s different, and that’s what makes it exhausting. What does it mean that today he’s claiming to impose a tariff of 50% against Brazil when tomorrow it might be 10% or none at all? It’s a lot of effort and noise with very little actual news. That’s the difference.

Cristian Farias:

Yeah, there’s that metaphor of the fire hose of announcements and information, and you don’t know what’s real, what isn’t. And as a reporter or the broader media, how do you even cover what exactly is the top headline that you want readers to know? And that must be extremely difficult.

S.V. Dáte:

Absolutely. Because again, you might be writing the exact opposite tomorrow. And the fire hose analogy, that’s one. Another one that I like to think of is the one from Shakespeare. It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And that’s often what we get. The man says false things all the time, sometimes because he’s lying, often because he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.

So I mean, for example, he constantly says that China paid hundreds of billions in tariffs, what I imposed tariffs on China. No, China didn’t pay a dime. Those are taxes on Americans. So it’s constant and constantly I try to point out what is true, what is not, but it’s exhausting. He can lie a lot faster than I can correct him, and he can lie a lot more enthusiastically and energetically than I have the patience and the time for. If you ask most Americans last year who pays tariffs, they would’ve told you the other countries because Donald Trump says this over and over and over and over again. And I’ve got other things to do. I can’t sit there and try to fact check every single thing because that would be my entire life, and that would be the lives of several other people as well. That’s the difference between this person and the last presidents.

Cristian Farias:

That’s kind of a perfect segue to my next question. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in August, 2020, you had a bit of a viral moment when you were in the White House briefing room and you got a chance to ask Trump a question.

S.V. Dáte:

Mr. President, after three and a half years, you regretted all the lying you’ve done to the American people.

Donald Trump:

All the what?

S.V. Dáte:

All the lying, all the dishonesties.

Donald Trump:

That who has done?

S.V. Dáte:

You have done.

Cristian Farias:

Can you reflect on that moment almost five years later? And I’m curious, do you still want to know the answer to that question?

S.V. Dáte:

Oh, absolutely. I would love to hear his answer to that. And I was not the first to ask questions like that. I think I was the first to phrase it in that manner. A little bit of context. I’d been trying to get an interview with him since he began his campaign in 2015, and one was kind of set up, and then I wrote a story for National Journal who I worked for at the time, about how if he’d taken the money that he’d inherited from his father or his father had given him control of it at a young age and just put it into the stock market, the S&P 500 fund, for example, he would’ve been many times as wealthy as he claimed to be at the time, many, many times. And that story ran, it got picked up a lot, got a lot of attention, and the interview was off and it never happened. And I’ve never been able to interview him subsequently for that and probably for many other reasons.

But it struck me early on that most of what he says is not true. Again, some of it he just doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. I mean, he’s a profoundly ignorant man, but he’s also an accomplished liar, and it’s hard to tease out those two.

Cristian Farias:

It’s funny because you also had another exchange with Trump earlier this year, if I’m not mistaken, aboard Air Force One. And basically for listeners, long story short, after you asked your question, Trump said he thought that HuffPost was dead as in no longer in existence. And then no longer after that, the White House kicked you out of the press pool. Can you tell me about that experience and why it happened, how you and HuffPost responded?

S.V. Dáte:

There’s a very small group traveling with him on the plane. There are 13 slots for journalists. Some of those are people who hold cameras and microphones and boom mics, things like that. So there’s a limited number of correspondents asking questions, probably about six or seven at most. So if you’re persistent, you can actually get a question in and he will hear it and respond. And my first question was, we’re on the way to New Orleans for the Super Bowl, and he’s making a big deal, a little greeting. First responders, police officers who’d handled a terrorist attack on New Year’s Day. And I asked him, “Well, you keep talking about first responders and want to honor them. Why did you pardon 400 people who assaulted police officers?” And he went into this long explanation of January 6th and how the cops weren’t the victims, the people who beat them up were somehow, and the next question I asked, he got irritated that I had managed to get his attention again. And that’s when he came back with that insult of HuffPost.

We didn’t think of anything of it at the time, but very soon it was my turn to be the in-town pool reporter, and they skipped over and picked someone else to do it, and then they redid the pool entirely after that. HuffPost responded, how will you respond? We wrote a story about it and we told the WHCA, the White House Correspondents’ Association who put out statements saying this was wrong and it shouldn’t happen, et cetera, et cetera, but there is no law that says there has to be a press pool. There’s no law that says that the WHCA runs it. It had been custom and precedent. And Trump doesn’t care about either of those things. So they basically reconfigured it more to their like and to have more people who are pro-Trump rather than journalists. And that’s where we stand today.

Cristian Farias:

Totally. And of course the reason you’re on with us is because this episode is dedicated in part to the case of the Associated Press and its exclusion from the White House press pool. And obviously this came before you were yourself excluded from the pool. And I’m curious if at that very moment, putting aside a little bit what you went through, if you felt the effect in real time among your peers or maybe you specifically when the White House said, “All right. No more AP here."

S.V. Dáte:

I realized right away what was going to be happening, and I started raising the alarm among my colleagues that, look, man, in fact, they wrote a column about that. They can do this to the AP, they can do it to us. There’s nothing that is remarkable about the AP situation compared to anybody else, and we need to stick up for them. Interestingly, on the very first day of this administration, he had an hour long back and forth with the reporters in the Oval Office that night, the night of the inauguration where he talked about all the pardons. He was signing all the executive orders and so on. At first, they only wanted the pool camera in there. They only wanted the TV pool and nobody else. And WHCA said, “Okay. Then you’ll have nobody because we’re not going to go along with this.” It never got to an actual ultimatum, but that’s where the conversation was headed and they backed off.

So what it comes down to is that Donald Trump cares about the visuals. He wants TV in there, he wants the stills in there, and he doesn’t care about anybody else. So unfortunately, that’s where the power lies right now is among the White House Correspondents’ Association. It’s still photographers and it’s the TV networks. They have the influence and the rest of us don’t. And until they’re ready to say, “Sorry, it’s all of us or none of us,” this is going to continue. And at this point, they’ve packed the press pool, not just the briefing, the press pool, with news outlets that are not news outlets. They’re basically Trump apologists and sycophants. And we went from a pool that was a size of 13 journalists and now we’ve removed on a daily basis four or five or six depending on the day, and replace them with people who ask questions like, “How are you so great, Mr. President, and why are we so lucky to have you as president?” I’m only slightly exaggerating. Some of the questions that have been asked have just been appalling.

Cristian Farias:

You said something just a few moments ago that I think it’s important by you noting that the press pool is very collective and that you kind of stick up for each other if you miss a quote and somebody else helps you fill it in because again, the quote doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the pool. But now in this new reality, it seems like some of that communal group aspect has been lost, and those who do remain in the pool unaffected aren’t sticking up for the rest of you. Am I reading that correctly?

S.V. Dáte:

No, that is correct. I mean, as an example, in-town pool today is not as bad as sometimes because today the secondary TV is something called Gray TV, which it’s a smaller television network, but they’re kind of real. The radio is Salem Radio Network, I believe, which is very right-wing. And then the new media seat, which is an invention, and it has basically replaced the seat that had originally been reserved for wire services is Timcast, which is Tim Pool, who is basically a conspiracy theorist who has a popular podcast. I’m sorry, this is nuts. There’s no wire service today, and there’s no wire service journalist print reporter in the pool, but we do have the guy who wears a beanie in skateboards and somehow has become an important voice in America. The out-of-town press pool today is not as bad. In fact, every single one is an actual journalist, but that’s not been the case.

We’ve had like OAN travel on the plane, we’ve had Daily Wire, we’ve had just ridiculous people who are not journalists, and you cannot count on them to behave in a collaborative manner or to get the quote accurate because that’s never something they’ve done. That’s the most dangerous thing here for democracy is that we’ve diluted the pool. His first foreign trip, AP or Bloomberg did not have a seat on the plane. Reuters, I think at the very end got on there at the last minute, but on the subsequent trip, there was no wire service. How do you do that? How do you take foreign trips and not have a single wire service reporter?

Cristian Farias:

My understanding is that they had to pay their own way to still take the trip and cover it from afar, basically.

S.V. Dáte:

From afar. I mean, we pay our own way on Air Force One. So let’s make that clear that this is not a free ride.

Cristian Farias:

Right.

S.V. Dáte:

We’re paying for that. What this means though is if there’s news on the plane, you might get some non-serious person whose job has been to do internet memes suddenly now responsible for a part of the pool. And I’ll tell you as a fact that they don’t collaborate with us. They’re basically tourists and voyeurs and they have no part in the pool. And I haven’t really investigated all of what they do, but one of them posted pictures, “Hey, I had a great time. I was on the plane. This is what we ate.” No, that’s not actually useful to anybody.

And the Trump White House, absolutely 100% doesn’t care. I’m hoping they’ll get bored of this because it is a pain in the neck for them to have to figure out who’s in the pool tomorrow and who’s not. Prior to them doing this, that was all handled by WHCA was a rotation. It was set. Everyone knew it. If you couldn’t make a particular slot, you traded with someone who could and you just let the White House know, but they didn’t care. As long as someone’s competent was doing it, it was fine. And now they pick and choose and play games and make sure to get people who suck up to them, give them extraordinary access so that they can promote their viewpoint. So that’s where we are.

Cristian Farias:

Something that strikes me about what you’re telling me, SV, is that we are already living this new normal where WHCA has no role in this press pool, and that’s a radical departure from how things used to be. And obviously the losers are the rest of us, the people who are consuming this information. And because of this fire hose nature of this presidency, it boggles my mind that this new radical reality of how news is being disseminated from the inner sanctum of the White House from the most powerful men on earth is now diluted, and that it’s not a scandal or as much of a scandal as it should be.

S.V. Dáte:

What’s sad is it’s not even a scandal in the media world. And what we should have done when they did that to AP was to say, “All right. Fine. None of us will come. Go by yourself or we’ll send a camera and that’s it, and no one’s going to engage with you and ask questions.”

That was actually my suggestion was we send the pool camera, but the camera person would not ask questions or engage in any way. They would just absolutely record. And Trump would hate that. He likes to insult us. He likes getting questions that he can then turn on us so you can have another forum in which he’s the victor, and that’s his thing, where every story is a story of Donald Trump vanquishing an enemy. And that’s what we are providing for him. And if he doesn’t get that, then maybe we’ll go back to normal. I don’t know. But this is not good in a democracy. Other western democracies press pools don’t operate like this. And to me, the big scandal was that the rest of us didn’t rise up and say absolutely not when they did the Associated Press, and we should have.

Cristian Farias:

HuffPost is a digital first newsroom, and at one point it probably raised eyebrows when HuffPost and other digital newsrooms joined the old guard of traditional outlets in the press pool or in the briefing room. Now, obviously there’s this new normal or new abnormal of the White House opening the briefing room in the pool to this new media, including these influencers and people like Tim Pool. And somebody who knows nothing about what we’re talking about might say, “Well, that’s a great thing. Let’s bring in new voices, new perspectives.” But something clearly has been lost in this process.

S.V. Dáte:

Well, there’s a big difference between having Tim Pool and his people in the briefing room and asking questions. If all they want to do is take those questions, fine. I’m not that concerned about the briefing room. I’m very concerned about the pool, which is traveling with president and is responsible for getting all the facts of what happened and what he said, what the people around him said, how he responded, his facial expressions, getting all that information out.

And if you’re not trained, you have no experience in being a journalist in noting these things and writing them down accurately. And I’m sorry, but some of these influencers have zero experience of that. None. Sometimes they don’t even write a story. They’ll just go and post memes on the internet based on what they saw. That’s not journalism. That’s not what the traveling pool or the in-town pool should be about. And if they want them to come in and ask their questions about how is the president so wonderful? Fine. Let them. I don’t have a problem with that. I mean, they can bring them into the Oval Off. They can have a press conference of only influencers. Great. But in situations where you have a meeting between the president and Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and they’re talking about the war, it’s not an appropriate place for people who don’t have any experience in journalism.

Cristian Farias:

SV Dáte, senior White House correspondent for HuffPost, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have this conversation with you. It was truly gold, and I wish you the best.

S.V. Dáte:

All right, man. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. We’ll do it again sometime.

Cristian Farias:

And that’s it for this week’s episode. Wow, what a grim note to end on. Hopefully the Federal Court step in soon and tell the president that the First Amendment means what it says. The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Night First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I’m your host, Christian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Matt Paikin and Candice White. Our associate producer for this episode is Kushal Dev, fact-checking by Kushal Dev, Ellie Fivas and Ella Sohn. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeking. Candice White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid de Silva. Thanks to Katie Fallow and SV Dáte who joined us for this episode.

The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, Knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K. And follow us on social media.