Trump and the wire services: When being there’s not worth it anymore

The wire services have a problem. And maybe a golden opportunity.

Last week, an Associated Press photographer and reporters from Reuters, HuffPost and the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel were barred from the Trump administration’s first cabinet meeting. This followed an announcement by the White House that it, not the White House Correspondents Association, will determine which media outlets have access to events in small spaces like the Oval Office.

The administration has also barred AP from news conferences and other events because it won’t change from Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America in its Stylebook. It also objects to the Stylebook’s usage of “gender-affirming care” and the capitalization of Black but not white.

“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press. We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle,” AP, Reuters and Bloomberg News said in a joint statement.

Every word of this statement is true, and AP had every right to sue to regain access to events.

But this dust-up also affords the chance to take a hard look at what “access” means in the digital age and what it costs to maintain it. The simple fact that these news services are still called the wires, when the actual wires are long gone, suggests that some re-evaluation may be due.

There was no AP reporter in the press pool for the spectacular Oval Office blowup with Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy. Instead, the pool included Brian Glenn of Real America’s Voice, who has dated U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. He set the tone for what followed by asking Zelenskyy why he didn’t wear a suit.

If that’s the price for being in the room — winking cooperation with the administration — then it would be better to cover the event from a television monitor and shift more resources to stories like the Securities and Exchange Commission’s dropping of several lawsuits and investigations of cryptocurrency businesses, and how that fits with Trump’s plans to create a national crypto strategic reserve. To be fair, we wouldn’t know what we do without the wires, but there are many stories that require no press pool access and could stand more attention.

Access is a two-way street. The administration can stage-manage some news events by salting the press pool with representatives of small right-wing news operations, but it needs the major news outlets to deliver its message to a broad audience.

After last week’s Oval Office clash, Trump is said to have described it as “great television,” and the enthusiastic response of his base on social media seemed to bear this out, whatever its implications for the globe. But you can cover television by watching television. Even those journalists granted their little space in the Oval Office didn’t have to be there.

To truly follow through on the idea that access, in the Washington sense of the word, is no longer necessary to inform the public would require some fundamental changes in the way the news is organized and presented. But volcanic changes are taking place in a business increasingly untethered from the morning paper and the evening news.

Journalists still need to be there, in the sense of being current with developments and in contact with knowledgeable sources. But being there physically has become increasingly less important in an age of streaming town council meetings and interviews on Zoom.

But you might be thinking access means more than that. It means sensing the feel of the room, getting the high sign that tells you how a vote goes, the whispered message that changes everything. Here again, access isn’t what it used to be. The casual comments have all been carefully reviewed, the talking points arranged in lockstep. There is not one scrap of news to be gained from being in the room that is worth changing one word of the AP Stylebook.