Out Of President’s Press Pool

Big news for the vaunted White House Correspondents Association: President Donald Trump has consented to attend the group’s annual dinner for the first time. Trump was the only president in more than 100 years who did not attend such a dinner during his first term and last year, too.  This year, he gave the nod and the privileged journos are gaga over it. If Trump were to be believed, his positive response to the invite was that the year marks the Nation’s 250th Birthday, which these “Correspondents” now admit that “I am truly one of the Greatest Presidents in the History of our Country”.

Founded in the 19th century, the Associated Press, whose footprints vastly cover the American media sphere where individual outlets do not have their own reporters filing particular stories, is given only restricted access to the White House events and the president’s programmes. The message was clear: the White House wanted to control the press. Those defying its intentions would be deprived of privileges on any technical ground. 

Foreign and Indian journalists gathered at the Press Lounge in New Delhi's Sastri Bhawan and someone would crack an oft-repeated but not worn-out joke: “Don’t speak parliamentary language.” That was in reference to some four-letter words or double-meaning phrases lifted from some formula-ridden Hindi movies in private discussions. 

After all, this scribe was at parliament, the upper house, when opposition members, including the great parliamentarian Atal Behari Vajpayee, joined, stood up and chanted “Galli may shor hay, Rajiv Gandhi chor hay” [voice rent the lanes that [Prime Minister] Rajiv Gandhi is a thief]. The accusing remarks featured in response to the alleged bribes were supposed to have lined the pockets of the Swedish Lockheed weapons factory.

Presidential rage

A barrage of invectives was showered on the Hon’ble judges of the Supreme Court. Incendiary comments calling the judges: Monsters, lunatics. Trump called fallen troops “losers” and “suckers”.

Now in his second term in office, Trump, who faced 91 criminal counts during his 2024 presidential bid, never misses an opportunity to put any blame on his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, for instigating and fanning the war that has dragged on into the fourth year without any breakthrough but a series of devastating defeats for Ukraine on the battlefield. Of note is that Biden, in an interview with the BBC, claimed that Trump was going out of his way to appease Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Breaking from the stand he took in not attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner held annually because of what he saw the group to be infested with fake news bakers, Donald Trump finally agreed to join the journalists in their annual programme of camaraderie in March. He was the exception who rebuffed the invite for the first time by a president since the annual tradition of correspondents with the White House as their news beat began in 1921.

In a once bitten twice shy approach, the White House beat reporters have cleared comedians roasting the night’s chief guest of honour. Barack Obama had been brutally roasted in a comedian's skit at such a dinner. To avoid Trump’s wrath, likely reluctance, or outright rejection, the hosts wanted to send the right message to please the chief guest. 

China’s Global Times pointed out that the BBC avoids using “kidnapped” when referring to the US forcibly seizing Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. An allowance was made to use the word “captured” to describe the operation that met with either stony silence or condemnation of much of the global community. The information was first disclosed by a British scribe contributing to the Guardian and the National, who wrote on his X account: “BBC journalists have been banned from describing the kidnapped Venezuelan leader as having been kidnapped.”

Last December, Trump filed a lawsuit against the BBC, accusing it of malicious editing of a documentary broadcast a week before the 2024 US presidential election, which had put together two disjointed parts of his 2021 speech. The controversy arose over Trump seeking $10 billion in damages from the BBC. Characteristically, he rejects a formal apology the broadcaster tendered.  He has also filed a lawsuit against CBS for alleged distortion of an interview, and seeks a $20 billion in damages. 

“What’s in a name?” might be the question the 15th-century dramatist William Shakespeare might ask in a statement suggesting the meaning of a name is for what people are taught to understand the word’s representation. But name does mean a mighty lot to the likes of Trump. The internationally subscribed Associated Press narrates that a first-hand experience will bear witness to the experience.

Punishing the press 

The Associated Press refused to oblige Trump, who insisted that all media rename the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America”. AP stuck to its ground by continuing with the usage of the Gulf of Mexico. The “defiance” incurred the president’s displeasure. The oldest existing news agency was ejected from the press pool privilege for coverage of the president’s programmes at the White House grounds, but not the Oval Office press conferences and self-paid travel on Air Force One, which offers limited seats for the press.

There’s a big gulf between Trump’s White House and the American press. “The AP therefore brings this action to vindicate its rights to the editorial independence guaranteed by the United States Constitution and to prevent the Executive Branch from coercing journalists to report the news using only government-approved language,” the lawsuit stated.

On the mighty strength inherent in a president, Trump mocks them by calling reporters posing tough questions “stupid” for asking a “stupid question”, and accusing them of being “creators of fake news”. Use of journalists by the army and intelligence agencies in most countries, especially the so-called advanced democracies, is hardly veiled, though not formally admitted. Sometime ago, the US military authorities were asked point-blank if they deployed their personnel under cover as journalists; the response was that such practice was not usual.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)