What a grand spectacle, the White House deciding who gets to play press pass! But wait, it’s not the first time the grand ol’ ‘Land of the Free’ has had a love affair with censorship. This is just another chapter in the never-ending saga of ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ where the government gets to pick its ‘trusted’ sycophants, while the rest of us are left to glean news from the filtered lens of PR flacks. Eugene Daniels, with his principled stance, seems more like a character from a John le Carré novel than the president of a correspondents’ association. As for the press pool, it’s not so much about access as it is about a stage set up for the White House to control the narrative. This is a classic case of a ‘free press’ being more like a ‘free slave’ to the administration’s whims.
Read from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/trump-white-house-press-policy.html