Today administration officials reportedly barred a number of news outlets from joining an informal press briefing. The AP has the details:
News organizations including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN and Politico were blocked from joining an informal, on the record White House press briefing on Friday. The Associated Press chose not to participate in the gaggle following the move by White House press secretary Sean Spicer. “The AP believes the public should have as much access to the president as possible,” Lauren Easton, the AP’s director of media relations, said in a statement. Several news organizations were allowed in, including the conservative website Breitbart News. The site’s former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, is chief strategist to President Donald Trump.
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For its part, the Trump administration is denying any ill intent, claiming instead that it had just invited a few additional reporters to join the pool:
White House Deputy Comms. Dir. Raj Shah denies reports of a gaggle block against CNN, NYT, Politico and others: pic.twitter.com/XzgfQJ25w3 — ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) February 24, 2017
I have a few thoughts. First, if the AP report is accurate, then the administration’s move was just silly and wrong. Full stop. The only reason to exclude a news organization from a press briefing should be space available, with space allocated on a viewpoint-neutral basis. Punishing the press by excluding the press (if that’s what happened here) is no way to run a press office.
Second, the White House should know that it’s move is completely unsustainable. Every news organization with any integrity will rightly boycott briefings if the White House excludes disfavored outlets. This is yet another one of the informal but effective checks on White House power. While a portion of Trump’s base may hate the media so much that they’re fine if Sean Spicer ends up only briefing Gateway Pundit, most of the rest of America finds press exclusion ridiculous.
Third, yes I know that the Obama administration’s hands weren’t clean on this point. Indeed, I’d forgotten how unclean they were. This 2009 New York Times report on the conflict between the Obama administration and Fox was a nice walk down memory lane:
Late last month, the senior White House adviser David Axelrod and Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive of Fox News, met in an empty Palm steakhouse before it opened for the day, neutral ground secured for a secret tête-à-tête. Mr. Ailes, who had reached out to Mr. Axelrod to address rising tensions between the network and the White House, told him that Fox’s reporters were fair, if tough, and should be considered separate from the Fox commentators who were skewering President Obama nightly, according to people briefed on the meeting. Mr. Axelrod said it was the view of the White House that Fox News had blurred the line between news and anti-Obama advocacy.
Why was the administration angry? Fox had been on the offensive. Other networks had confessed they had not been fast enough in covering stories Fox was covering, including Van Jones’s controversial comments and affiliations:
At the same time, Fox News had continued a stream of reports rankling White House officials and liberal groups that monitor its programming for bias. Those reports included a critical segment on the schools safety official Kevin Jennings, with the on-screen headline “School Czar’s Past May Be Too Radical”; urgent news coverage of a video showing schoolchildren “singing the praises, quite literally, of the president,” which the Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson later called “pure Khmer Rouge stuff”; and the daily anti-Obama salvos from Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as “not a news network.”
“Not a news network” sounds a bit like “fake news,” does it not? The president himself waded into the fray:
Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about the network, according to people briefed on the conversation. Then, in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday, the president went public. “What our advisers have simply said is that we are going to take media as it comes,” he said. “And if media is operating, basically, as a talk radio format, then that’s one thing. And if it’s operating as a news outlet, then that’s another.”
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The Treasury Department reportedly tried to exclude Fox from a “round of interviews” with executive-pay czar Kenneth Feinberg, and — just like today — Fox’s competitors rebelled. Bret Baier hadn’t forgotten the incident and tweeted this:
Some at CNN & NYT stood w/FOX News when the Obama admin attacked us & tried 2 exclude us-a WH gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs https://t.co/8Vjcs0KCPR — Bret Baier (@BretBaier) February 24, 2017
I share these details not to justify Trump administration actions but to note that we’re not exactly in uncharted territory. Administrations are tempted to take action against “unfriendly” news organizations, and it’s incumbent on news outlets to follow Benjamin Franklin’s admonition (given in far more consequential times), “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
It’s one thing to bash the press. It’s another thing entirely to take steps to deny access to disfavored outlets. When it comes to access, Trump needs to be better than Obama, not worse.
On Friday White House Press Secretary  held an informal "gaggle" press briefing but made a point of excluding certain news outlets.  The White House's decision has drawn ire from across the field, including organizations invited to the briefing, such as  and ''''.
Sean Spicer, from file.  
''The New York Times'' and CNN, as well as the BBC, '''', ''Al Jazeera'', the '''', , '''', and ''The Daily Mail'', were all barred from attending the meeting, while Reuters, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News, Bloomberg, and the heavily conservative news outlets , , and '''' were admitted.  '''', the Associated Press, and some other outlets were invited to the briefing but .

Spicer held the meeting in his office rather than the usual briefing room. He told the press the smaller gathering was because Trump had already made a large speech earlier in the day. "We want to make sure we answer your questions, but we don't need to do everything on camera every day."  However, he also criticized media coverage of the Trump administration, which President Trump has cited as unfair. "We're going to aggressively push back," one reporter recorded him saying at the gaggle. "We're just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there."

This meeting took place the day after CNN issued a report claiming the White House had asked high-level employees at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to rebut a story in ''The New York Times'' about the Trump administration's alleged ties with Russia and Vladimir Putin.

"Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don't like. We'll keep reporting regardless," said CNN in a statement.

"Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties," said ''New York Times'' executive editor Dean Baquet. "We strongly protest the exclusion of ''The New York Times'' and the other news organizations. Free media access to a transparent government is obviously of crucial national interest."

"While we strongly object to the White House's apparent attempt to punish news outlets whose coverage it does not like," said Buzzfeed editor-in-chief , "we won't let these latest antics distract us from the work of continuing to cover this administration fairly and aggressively."

BBC bureau chief Paul Denahar was more formal: "We understand there may be occasions when, due to space or circumstances, the White House restricts press events to the established pool.  However, what happened today did not fit into that pattern. On this occasion selected media were allowed to attend the briefing and the selected media, including the BBC, were not."

'''' contributor David French also criticized the decision: "The only reason to exclude a news organization from a press briefing should be space available, with space allocated on a viewpoint-neutral basis. ... It's one thing to bash the press. It's another thing entirely to take steps to deny access to disfavored outlets. When it comes to access, Trump needs to be better than Obama, not worse." He combined these remarks with a discussion of the Obama administration's relationship with Fox News.

Some of the news organizations invited to Spicer's meeting also opposed the exclusion of their peers:

"Some at CNN and ''New York Times'' stood with Fox News when the Obama admin attacked us and tried to exclude us," said Fox anchor  via Twitter, "a White House gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs."

"''The Wall Street Journal'' strongly objects to the White House's decision to bar certain media outlets from today's gaggle," added a representative for the newspaper. "Had we known at the time, we would not have participated and we will not participate in such closed briefings in the future."

The  took a milder view: "We're not happy with how things went today," said association president Jeff Mason. "I don't think that people should rush to judgment to suggest that this is the start of a big crackdown on media access."

Donald Trump has stated the mainstream media portrayed the first month of his presidency unfairly, calling some of their reports "fake news" and the press themselves the "enemy of the people" and insisting they refrain from using anonymous sources. "I'm against the people that make up stories and make up sources," he told the  in Washington D.C.

"President Trump's calls for an end to anonymous sources was 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," said Joel Simon of the .