Fox News’ senior White House correspondent has attacked the Trump administration’s decision to choose the rotating press “pool” that covers the president on a daily basis, overturning a century-old arrangement with the official press corps.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced the press corps would no longer have the power to decide who from among its ranks will follow Trump. The move will “give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows and who listen to your radio stations,” she said.
The five major TV networks—NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and CNN—will continue to remain in rotation, Leavitt added. But that did nothing to assuage Fox’s senior White House correspondent, Jacqui Heinrich, who ripped into the decision on social media.
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“This move does not give the power back to the people—it gives power to the White House,” Heinrich wrote in a post X.
“WHCA [the White House Correspondents’ Association] has determined pools for decades because only representatives FROM our outlets can determine resources all those outlets have—such as staffing—in order to get the President’s message out to the largest possible audience, no matter the day or hour,” she added.
During Tuesday’s announcement of the new rules, Leavitt said the White House’s goal in choosing who covers the president was to give “more outlets and new outlets” a chance to participate in the press pool, reflecting the “ever-changing landscape of the media in the United States today.”
But adding to the press pool and choosing it outright are two very different things, Heinrich wrote in a separate post on X. The WHCA has never opposed the White House adding members to the pool, she said.
The move ends a tradition going back more than a century of the news organizations themselves deciding who goes along with the chief executive in order to hold him accountable to the public, the Associated Press reported. The move comes as the White House has banned the AP for refusing to describe the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” following an executive order renaming the oceanic basin.
Peter Baker, the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, wrote on X that the new pool policy “reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access.”
But MAGA influencers, who seemed giddy at the prospect of maybe getting their own golden ticket onto Air Force One, tried to push back on Heinrich’s criticism, demanding to know who “elected” the WHCA.
“The gatekeeping is over. Get over it,” one MAGA pundit with more than 24,000 subscribers on Substack replied to her initial post.
“If you think MAGA benefits from this in the long term, you’re dead wrong. You would not have trusted any Democratic admin to pick its own pool—but now that door is open,” Heinrich shot back. “Just wait til a Dem admin plays that same game. You’ll hate it.”
