The most remarkable thing about President Donald Trump’s hissy-fit expulsion of CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House grounds is how difficult it is to tell that they’re gone. That’s not to denigrate these three news outlets, two of which previously employed yours truly. (I was labor policy editor at Politico, and before that I wrote a web column on contract for MS NOW when it was called MSNBC.) My target rather is the press room inside which the White House beat reporters are confined. The dirty little secret of this prestige address has long been that very little news emanates from it.
One could almost state it as a mathematical formula: The value of White House reporting is inversely proportional to its physical distance from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, and then continued to own it, from half a mile away at the old Post headquarters on 15th Street. Maggie Haberman delivers the best Trump coverage of anybody from 225 miles away at the New York Times building on 8th Avenue. One current White House reporter told me that 90 percent of the job consists of working the phones.
It’s been a while since I’ve been inside the place, but the White House press quarters, which once housed a swimming pool, is a claustrophobic warren from which reporters are forbidden to stray. Even a chat with a senior press aide like Stephen Cheung requires an appointment; you can’t get into his upstairs office without one. Lower-level press aides situated in a room behind the famous podium are available, but they aren’t cleared to answer any but the most anodyne question.
The prestigious reporters reduced to a stenographic function within this veal cage feel infantilized and tend to get cranky. “Send the interns,” advised the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen nine years ago. Nicholas von Hoffman set the scene for TNR four decades ago in his wickedly funny “The White House News Hole” (September 1982). The venerable Boston Globe White House correspondent Curtis Willkie told von Hoffman that “The White House press room is the only day care center in America Ronald Reagan hasn’t abolished.”
At the time von Hoffman and Rosen were writing there was still a White House daily briefing, but Trump got rid of those. Now the briefings occur once or twice weekly if they occur at all. These can sometimes possess value, if only by providing an occasion to observe which questions elicit “no comment.” Occasionally, too, reporters will get a background briefing in which some government official imparts actual information. But under Trump, the ritual combat has become so constant, with reporters routinely getting lectured about telling lies, hating America, and so on, as to render these briefings very nearly worthless. (Much the same performative nonsense has diminished congressional hearings, which have come to consist mostly of rude insults from administration officials alternating with orations and testy “yes or no?” interjections from members of Congress.)
To the limited extent access to the White House press warren benefits anybody, it’s TV reporters and producers. Now and then Trump will make himself available to a pool of 20 or so White House reporters at which he will yet again demonstrate his castration complex by snarling at some challenging question from a woman reporter. The resulting video will go viral. But how many times do we need to be reminded that Trump thinks all females are pigs? We’ve already seen him aboard Air Force One telling Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey, “Quiet, piggy.” He’s also called woman reporters “stupid” and “ugly.”
At the moment, there is no TV pool, because the remaining news networks that participate in it (ABC, CBS, and Fox News) pulled out in solidarity with CNN, Politico, and MS NOW’s lawsuit demanding reinstatement. It quickly became apparent that the news networks possessed all the leverage. This was demonstrated most hilariously on Monday when the White House website’s livestream of a Trump gaggle, in which Trump cut the ribbon on a new White House helipad, was inaudible. The White House depends on TV technicians to capture Trump’s audio on such occasions; when the TV technicians aren’t there, this is what happens. But even after the White House fixes this technical problem, the fact will remain that Trump has lost access to a huge distribution network on which he relies to spread his utterances, however inane, across the globe. It was telling that none of the reporters who covered Trump yawping inaudibly into the wind tried to find out what the absent mics failed to pick up. Nobody gave a shit.
The dry run for Trump’s press expulsion was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Nebuchadnezzar-like expulsion of the press from the Pentagon. This occurred in three stages. Stage One, in May 2025, was an order requiring reporters to be escorted by a government official through parts of the Pentagon to which previously they’d enjoyed free access. Stage Two, in September 2025, was an order requiring reporters to give up all access to the Pentagon unless they signed an oath not to gather any information not released by the federal government. All the real reporters in the building, of course, refused to sign. Stage Three, in June 2026, was to declare the press office a classified space and bar reporters from it altogether. The last thing you want hanging around a press office is press.
Did the journalists thus expelled to Babylon sit down, weep, and hang their harps among the willows? They did not. If anything, they plucked their harps more vigorously, reporting that Hegseth ordered the survivors of an air strike against a Venezuelan boat to be killed; that an elementary school the United States bombed in Iran had been placed, erroneously, on a military target list; that the United States was fast running out of accurate long-range missiles in its war in Iran; and that the Pentagon forced out top leaders at Stars and Stripes in retaliation for a Stars and Stripes story reporting a decline in mental health aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln after 250 days at sea and 40 days of continuous combat operations. Many of these stories were broken by The Washington Post, which had its own Jeffuchadnezzar to contend with. If the ability to report big stories were wholly dependent on proximity, Seymour Hersh would never have broken the story of the My Lai Massacre via the ragtag Dispatch News Service.
It’s wrong for Trump to kick reporters out of the White House, and it’s also illegal; a Trump-appointed judge will almost certainly soon order the president to let them back in. Restoring access to CNN, Politico, and MS NOW will enable these news organizations to once again provide certain routine and unexciting coverage of the Trump White House; it may conceivably help reporters for those news organizations to cultivate a few sources. But the exile’s effect on meaningful news coverage is awfully close to nil, and the only party it punishes in any noticeable way is Trump himself.