**WASHINGTON — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration’s changes to the presidential press pool as an expansion of access rather than a restriction, arguing that a small group of outlets should not hold a permanent monopoly on the 13-person rotation that follows the president.**
Speaking with Axios co-founder Mike Allen at a media event, Leavitt rejected the premise that new rules risk erasing the historical record. Allen noted that the Associated Press reaches a vast global audience and that AP chief photographer Evan Vucci made the widely recognized image of President Donald Trump after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. He asked whether limits on wire services would mean “history being lost.”
Leavitt said she does not view the policy as a restriction. “We view them as opening access to more outlets, more voices, more news, journalists and outlets,” she said. Thousands of outlets hold White House credentials, she added, and hundreds cover the beat daily. “Why should a single outlet have the privilege of being in that 13-person press pool every single day?” The changes, she said, give print organizations such as Axios a greater chance to rotate into the pool and produce “more transparency, more accessibility, and greater access for a broad variety of outlets and a diversity of journalists.”
Allen cited a White House Correspondents’ Association statement on the administration’s handling of wire services: that the government should not control the independent media that covers it. Leavitt replied that a small board of journalists should not dictate who enters the Oval Office or flies on Air Force One. “There should be equal access for all outlets. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
She said the White House still admits outlets it regards as hostile. “If we were trying, by the way, to create positive press for the president… we wouldn’t allow some of these fake news leftist outlets in. But we continue to do that. No one has been restricted. We’ve just given more spots to more outlets and more voices.” The goal, she said, is not ideology but a wider mix of voices in a digital media environment. Trump, she added, ran a nontraditional campaign, and the White House intended to reflect that in how it organizes coverage.
The remarks sit inside a longer fight over who assigns pool slots. For decades the White House Correspondents’ Association managed much of that rotation. The second Trump administration took a larger role in deciding which organizations travel with the president and sit in limited spaces. Critics, including the WHCA, say that shift lets the government pick its own chroniclers. The administration says legacy wires and networks had locked in daily seats while newer digital and print outlets waited.
Leavitt also contrasted Trump’s visibility with former President Joe Biden’s. An Axios analysis drawing on tallies by presidential communications scholar Martha Joynt Kumar found that, at a comparable point late in a term, Biden had given fewer formal press conferences and media interviews than several recent predecessors. One widely cited mid-2024 snapshot put Biden at 164 combined conferences and interviews, compared with 468 for Trump in his first term at a similar mark, with George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in between. Separate Kumar-based reporting later in Trump’s second term found a high volume of short Q-and-A sessions and interviews, even when formal solo news conferences were less frequent. Definitions matter: pool gaggles, joint appearances and sit-down interviews are counted differently across studies.
Supporters of the White House say more outlets in the pool and a president who takes questions often produce a fuller public record. Press advocates say independence of the pool, especially wire photographers and reporters who feed the rest of the industry, is what preserves that record when administrations change. The debate is less about whether news still moves than about who stands in the room when it does.
