4 flashpoints in the Trump White House's war with legacy media

Just one month into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, his administration has harshly shaken up relations between the White House and the press corps that covers it. 

“The White House approach to media relations, like so much of this administration, bears little resemblance to the traditional norms we’ve come accustomed to over the decades,” says Pam Jenkins, global chief public affairs officer and global chief public health officer at The Weber Shandwick Collective. “That should shock no one — disruption is the hallmark of this administration and a source of pride that reflects their willingness to break things.” 

That disruption is unprecedented, and likely just getting started. “The level of tension and distrust between traditional media and the office of the White House, and disruption in press relations, has reached truly historic levels,” Jenkins says. 

Here’s a rundown of the administration’s assault on legacy media.   

The Trump team takes issue with the AP Stylebook 

On February 11, the White House barred a credentialed Associated Press reporter from covering Oval Office events with the president and blocked an AP reporter and photographer from boarding Air Force One. The reason: the news agency’s refusal to comply with a Trump executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich made clear the administration has many grievances with the Stylebook. “This isn’t just about the ‘Gulf of America,’” he told Axios. “This is about AP weaponizing language through their Stylebook to push a partisan worldview in contrast with the traditional and deeply held beliefs of many Americans." 

Alternative media and right-wing commentators have criticized AP’s capitalization of “Black” to describe race and the use of “they” as a singular for nonbinary people. 

“This strikes me as more of a culture war than an assault on the media,” observes Pete Seat, VP of Bose Public Affairs Group and one-time deputy assistant press secretary to former President George W. Bush. “But this is a disservice that will deprive Trump voters. There are more than 1,000 newspapers in this country that utilize AP because they don’t have their own resources to cover the president, so if AP isn’t in the Oval Office and not on Air Force Once, it can’t document the presidency, Trump’s words and actions, in those papers.” 

The administration surely weighed the pros and cons of blocking access to the AP, experts say.

“They decided to care more about the glossary of the AP Stylebook, figuring people can watch and read other outlets,” adds Seat. “But even Fox News uses AP. Most roads lead back to them.” 

“The AP, Reuters and Bloomberg have always been part of the pool as wire services. Their reporting gets picked up all over the world,” says Kendra Barkoff, MD at SKDK and former press secretary to former President Joe Biden when he was vice president. “You shouldn’t be able to pick and choose based on how you like someone’s reporting. It’s scary and sad.” 

“New media” gets a rotating seat in the press briefing room 

In her first press briefing on January 20, new White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt  said there would be a rotating seat in the James S. Brady White House Press Briefing Room.

“This seat in the front of the room, which is usually occupied by the press secretary’s staff, will be called the new media seat,” she said, inviting content creators, influencers and podcasters to apply for credentials, and promising to give them the first question at each briefing.  

The first occupants were Axios founder Mike Allen and Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle, though both outlets have long had a presence at the White House without a permanent seat. 

“It shouldn’t come as a shock that they opened the room to podcasters and, for lack of a better word, alternative media. We even saw former Vice President Kamala Harris move away from mainstream media during campaign season in trying to reach a broader audience,” says Dan Scandling, senior director in APCO’s government relations practice, who previously served as comms director and chief of staff for numerous House Republicans. “This is just a sign of the times.” 

“Despite declarations to the contrary, it’s not revolutionary,” adds Seat. “The Trump White House is not the first administration to embrace new media or non-traditional outlets. It's not even the first Trump White House to do it.” 

He points out that in 2017, former press secretary Sean Spicer used Skype to bring voices in from outside the Beltway, including conservative talk-show hosts. 

Alex Conant, founding partner of Firehouse Strategies and a campaign trail veteran, agrees. 

“Every White House feels frustrations with the press and tries to find new ways to engage friendlier media. When I worked in the Bush White House, we tried to go around the national press corps by doing as much local media as possible,” he says. “Trump’s attempts to get his message out through friendly podcasts is no different than Biden engaging TikTok stars.” 

However, even a Trump White House will keep coming back to the main players in the press corps. For instance, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spoke with CBS News this week to reassure the public that air travel is safe after incidents at airports in Washington, DC, and Toronto. 

“Ultimately, every White House learns that it cannot ignore the media that covers them every day,” says Conant. “The White House press corps has been around for hundreds of years and will outlast whoever the current Oval Office occupant is. Trump’s base loves it when he attacks the mainstream media, but he simultaneously recognizes how important they are to getting his messages out.”  

DOGE targets Politico, news subscriptions 

DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency” overseen by Elon Musk, has slammed government agency spending on news subscriptions as excessive and ordered immediate cancelations. 

According to TheWashington Post, the State Department has ordered the cancelation of all news subscriptions deemed “non-mission critical,” singling out six outlets — The Economist, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, the AP and Reuters — in a memo emailed to embassies and consulates in Europe.  

Leavitt said the federal government would cancel $8 million in Politico subscriptions, elevating misinformation on X falsely claiming to show that the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID) made payments to it, seemingly in return for positive coverage. Musk also reposted a false claim that the Department of Defense made a $9 million payment to Reuters for a “large-scale social deception project.”

Embassies, of course, rely on news coverage to prepare for diplomatic travel. Many government agency personnel subscribe to the premium Politico Pro product for its detailed policy newsletters, bill trackers, government directories, transcripts, personalized alerts and notifications and other services.  

“I read it religiously every morning,” says Scandling. He says Politico Pro’s reporting, analysis and other services are indispensable to staying well-informed. “The agencies need it. The federal employees need it. Congress needs it.” 

“But the Trump administration is looking to cut costs, and media is an easy, big target,” he adds. 

“If you’re a Politico Pro subscriber, you’re getting important information 20 to 30 minutes before everybody else,” says Seat. “Those minutes can be the difference between a bill passing, failing or something else of consequence. Nobody was getting a subscription because they were trying to do [Politico editor-in-chief] John Harris a solid. They had a subscription because it was valuable to their work.” 

Trump’s “payback” on legacy media

On February 7, the Trump administration gave a week for four media outlets — The New York Times, National Public Radio, NBC News and Politico — to vacate their dedicated office spaces in the Pentagon. They were replaced by Breitbart News Network, HuffPost, New York Post and One America News Network.  

The change is part of a new annual "media rotation program,” in which one outlet from print, online, TV and radio will rotate out of the Pentagon to welcome a new resident. 

“It’s Trump’s payback to mainstream media,” says Scandling. “[The administration’s] feeling is, ‘You guys don’t cover us the way we want to be covered, and so we’re not going to give you the access that you think you deserve or want.’”

Jenkins agrees, and without greater public support, says there seems little that media institutions can do about it.  

“Traditional media has been so disparaged over the years that their influence on shaping a common understanding of events has been heavily eroded. The White House can marginalize national outlets with relatively little public outcry, while eliciting cheers from his base,” she says.  

Jenkins adds that the administration’s mission seems to be making mainstream outlets’ coverage of Trump’s presidency arduous, stressful and confusing.  

“With the White House’s proclivity to ‘flood the zone’ with so many actions, threats, surprises, all day every day, the media struggles to cover, analyze and follow-up on any one issue,” she says. “It’s a constant state of dislocation, almost chaos, which is exhausting and mind-numbing for viewers, listeners and followers. If it’s an intentional media strategy by the administration, it seems to be working as planned.”