Changes coming to White House press room

With the naming of Sean Spicer as White House press secretary, Donald J Trump has selected a Republican Party insider and communications veteran.
 

But that doesn’t mean it will be business as usual for the press corps that covers the next administration.

Trump’s unconventional, sometimes hostile, relationship with the news media and his penchant for communicating through unfiltered Twitter posts threaten to upend a decades-old Washington tradition that relies almost entirely on protocol. The result, reporters and editors say, could be a loss of transparency that would hinder the press’s role as a conduit for information to the people.

But Trump’s advisers, and even some former White House press secretaries, say that some of the conventions of White House coverage are outdated and due for a face-lift.

In a radio interview this month, Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, suggested that traditions including the daily televised press briefings and seating assignments could change. “I think it’s time to revisit a lot of these things that have been done in the White House, and I can assure you that change is going to happen, even on things that might seem boring like this topic,” he told the radio host Hugh Hewitt.

Spicer, in an interview with Fox News on Thursday night, said the new regime wanted to be “innovative, entrepreneurial” about its media operations. While he said he believed there would be daily briefings, he suggested the format could change, perhaps by adding new elements, eliminating some television coverage and bringing “more people into the process.”

All this has stirred concern among journalists who say seemingly small changes to the system could lead to the diminishing of other traditions.

“Beginning to suggest the daily briefings shouldn’t happen every day in the format that they are, I think, begins to establish a slippery slope,” said Scott Wilson, the national editor for The Washington Post, who was a White House correspondent during the Obama presidency. “There is value in having a formal setting where the administration’s position is stated and can be referred to and can be archived.”

Since his election, Trump has shown few reservations about ignoring the norms of presidential media coverage. He has defied convention by refusing to allow journalists to travel with him on his plane — including on his flight to the White House for his first meeting with President Obama.

In a highly publicised incident in mid-November, he left Trump Tower for dinner with his family without telling the reporters assigned to cover his whereabouts, sending the reporters scrambling for information. And while Trump has granted some interviews, including with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, he also has not held a news conference since late July, preferring instead to use Twitter as his megaphone.

The protocols that underpin the relationship between the news media and the president might seem arcane to many Americans. But press advocates say these traditions, even in the age of Twitter, ensure fundamental tenets of democracy: historical record and access to information.