White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitts announced that moving forward, the White House will be selecting the news outlets they will allow to cover President Trump in close quarter events on Tuesday, Feb. 25. These close quarters events include press conferences and events with limited access.
The White House tried to cover up their true motivation by advertising this decision as an opportunity for smaller news outlets who would usually be considered to cover these events to have their time to shine, but President Donald Trump already made his intent to control the press clear in his decision to bar the Associated Press. They were barred for the reason of not complying with the name change from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Trump is punishing them for exercising their first amendment. This is violating the first amendment, which is a main characteristic of the freedom America prides itself on.
This new incentive denies the Associated Press privileged access to certain events that they would previously have had access to, such as press conferences and meetings. With this new incentive Trump’s board will be dictating the journalists or news outlets who get to cover their work, this could lead to an increase in biased stories if they mainly choose republican ran news outlets. This also gives the administration to leave out outlets that may not align with their beliefs which overall could cause an increase in biased stories.
This is a huge threat to journalism because Trump is essentially censoring certain outlets who don’t agree with him. A lot of people rely on news outlets for their political opinion, whether the medium is television, social media or articles for their political news. This hinders a lot of people’s political knowledge and if more news outlets start getting censored this will start a chain reaction of general bias toward Trump in the press which can severely hurt the society by wrongly influencing people into thinking something is good because they have been influenced to do so. Journalists serve as a voice for citizens and by censoring, it takes away this voice for a majority of citizens, which completely violates the first amendment.
News outlets are a big part of politics because they give accurate information to support citizens’ free thinking and leave them to form opinions. This is a power move to show news outlets how he can control them if they do not conform. He used the Associated Press as an example to other news outlets of how he will unfairly use his power. This could be easily avoided by sticking to the original system we have been using for so long that has worked so well for us.
