On Friday of last week, the President of the White House Correspondent's Association (WHCA), Jeff Mason, sent letters to his organization's staff saying that he and others had met with White House officials that week to discuss their issues with press briefings. Over the past few weeks and since President Trump had returned from his trip to Saudi Arabia and Europe, both Press Secretaries Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have banned recording devices in the Brady room, ignored members of the press, have not held press briefings on a regular basis as well as cutting them short in what many see as protection of the President as well as the White House avoiding accountability.

Breaking with tradition

Other reports have acknowledged that these meetings with the WHCA had taken place and Spicer and Sanders have explained their sides where they also vowed to be more open with their briefings. Of course, this isn't an issue that's coming from the association so much as the White House itself by breaking with decades of tradition. White House aides would only have to hold regular briefings as they always have but the issue appears to be more of their deliberate attempt to make it harder for the press to cover the White House. Many opinion and analysis pieces in the media have said that on-camera press briefings were never the norm until the early 90s.

A growing war with the media

Many of them have also provided a comparison of when U.S. presidents have accommodated the press in their own way. As the days pass, however, the White House goes further into a black-out by no longer publishing the President's schedule and so there are less details about what he is set to do on a daily basis.

Cabinet members have already reportedly stopped bringing the press in tow with them and when they have, they have essentially dumped them. There are already signs of reporters becoming angry with the press secretaries. For instance, it's been reported that CNN's Jim Acosta had called Sean Spicer "useless" after their first full day of the crackdown on the press corp.

A columnist and executive editor for a few Sentinel newspapers, Brian Karem, also lashed out at Sanders this week when she called them all fake news. As a side note, the trump administration -- since it was a campaign -- has referred to stories that put him in a negative light as "fake news". The term has gone viral and is used by Trump supporters to attack media outlets such as CNN and others as well as reporters they don't like to get tough questions from. There have been at last a few times when the administration has dumped the press and allowed foreign media outlets to cover the event such as they did when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson traveled to Moscow.

During that trip, Tillerson reportedly dumped the press that had gone there to cover the meeting and when he finally met with President Putin Russian state media was there to cover it instead.

This also happened when Russian officials came to the White House to meet with the President, U.S. media was not allowed to cover the meeting instead, it was Russia Today. A growing number of reporters have recently demanded that the media boycott the White House for not having on-camera recordings. In a similar sign of aggression, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC's Morning Joe was viciously attacked by President Trump via Twitter this week as to her appearance. Republicans rushed to her defense for the attack being beneath the presidency. Morning Joe also responded to an attempt by the President to blackmail the program using the National Enquirer. Here is a video of that incident.
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