One of the reasons the American political establishment really hates it when Trump is president is that his administration has a tendency to bring out and exaggerate dynamics at play in Washington, DC that the establishment would prefer to keep hidden.

One such example is the weaponization of media access.

Right at the beginning of this term, Trump’s team shook things up by announcing that, going forward, they would control which journalists were allowed into White House press briefings and would determine where each would sit.

Establishment journalists did little to hide their displeasure as the administration brought right-wing news sites, podcasters, and influencers to briefings that had always been reserved for “respectable” outlets. They characterized it as Trump shattering a decades-long tradition of media independence to prop up media figures loyal to him.

The anger with Trump’s shake-up came to a head when the administration banned the Associated Press (AP) from White House Briefings after the news wire service refused to call the Gulf of Mexico by its new official name, the Gulf of America.

As a result of that ban, which has mostly held up in court, many are trying to portray the president’s approach to the press pool as a brand-new form of authoritarianism that Trump has only recently introduced to Washington.

But that isn’t true. Granting, controlling, and revoking access to official briefings, restricted government facilities, and the sites of government activities has been one of the political establishment’s favorite tools of media control for over a century.

An urban legend says that the White House press pool was formed one night in 1900 when President Theodore Roosevelt noticed a group of reporters struggling to find sources outside in the rain and invited them into the White House.

The story is likely not true. But still, the imagery of a president inviting struggling journalists in from a cold rainy night and giving them access to the White House is perfect symbolism for the government’s approach to the press. It appears benevolent and, on the surface, seems to embody the democratic principle of transparency. But by bringing certain journalists in, excluding others, and retaining the power to revoke access, the government gained leverage and control over much of the press. …

Sometimes, the White House has combined its pooling and embedding approach to great effect, such as in 2003 when Mike Allen—then at The Washington Post—was brought along for President George W. Bush’s secret trip to Baghdad. Or, two decades later, when Wall Street Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui was tapped to accompany President Biden on his secret train ride to Kyiv in early 2023.

The press dutifully wrote accounts of the trips that were more obnoxiously dramatic than anything the White House communications teams could ever get away with. But that was the point. These were publicity stunts. The journalists weren’t there to observe the trips; they were the entire point of the trips.

Today, some of the most extreme examples of weaponized access are not coming from officials in Washington but from their allies in Kyiv and Tel Aviv. The Ukrainian government has been very quick to revoke the credentials of foreign journalists when their reporting either reveals things the government wants to remain secret or debunks aspects of the regime’s official narrative. And the Israeli government has banned any foreign journalists from entering Gaza unless they’re brought in by the IDF.

So it’s ridiculous to hear the legacy media, here in the US, trying to act like Trump is breaking tradition with his use of access and accreditation to control how the media is reporting on his administration. That has been one of the hallmarks of the political establishment’s strategy for controlling the public’s understanding of current events for many decades. The only reason why they suddenly see it as a problem is because, now, they’re not the ones benefiting.