What is the White House press pool and why does it matter?
President Gerald R. Ford, right, takes a question from NBC White House correspondent Tom Brokaw during Ford’s first press conference as president after the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, in Washington, Aug. 27, 1974.
David Hume Kennerly | Hulton Archive | Getty Images
The White House press pool covers and travels with the U.S. president every day, providing news outlets and the public with a near-constant stream of information on the leader’s activities.
With the television pool suspending coverage of President Donald Trump after he banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, the public could be deprived of critical information about the president’s activities.
The five networks that have made up the White House television pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News — rotate each day by having one network that covers everything the president does that is open to press coverage. They feed video to other news organizations, and it airs on television stations while also being used by journalists who are not in those spaces to report in real time what the president says.
The pool has chronicled U.S. presidents every day for nearly a century, since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to the White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents journalists who cover the White House and advocates for access to the president. Pool reporters brought the nation live coverage of events including the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Broadcast, still photographers, print or digital and radio reporters cover the president at the White House and when he travels, from each day’s initial “call time” to when a “lid” is called — the time when staff alerts reporters that the White House says the president will not be seen again for the day.
The pool gives the public extensive access to the president’s activity and lets the president quickly summon reporters when the White House wants to widely disseminate information. The pool, which is coordinated by the White House Correspondents’ Association, includes rotating representatives from participating news outlets, which pay for their journalists’ travel with the president.
CNN was scheduled to be the TV network pool representative for the president’s trip to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday.
The rest of the TV pool said they would not replace CNN in a backup capacity, effectively depriving live video footage from independent news media of the president’s activity in New York.
Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.
Source – CNBC
