☀️ Happy Thursday! The Briefing is your guide to the world of news and information. Sign up here!
In today’s email:
- Featured story: White House announces it will now select press pool
- In other news: Associated Press sues Trump officials after losing access
- Looking ahead: Bezos announces changes to The Washington Post’s opinion section
- Chart of the week: Where news influencers discussed the presidential candidates before the election
🔥 Featured story
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Tuesday that the White House will now select which news outlets cover the president in the press pool, a smaller group of reporters who have access to the president when limited space is available (such as in the Oval Office or on Air Force One).
This group, which has been chosen by the White House Correspondents’ Association for decades, then shares its reporting with the broader set of journalists covering each administration. Eugene Daniels, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, responded to the announcement by saying the organization will no longer distribute reporting from the White House’s selected press pool.
In a Pew Research Center survey conducted two months before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, 74% of Americans said criticism from news organizations keeps political leaders from doing things that shouldn’t be done, while far fewer (24%) said this type of scrutiny keeps leaders from doing their job. But when Donald Trump first became president in 2017, the share of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who expressed belief in this “watchdog” role for journalists declined sharply.
📌 In other news
- The Associated Press sues Trump officials over freedom of speech concerns
- Who are the far-right journalists gaining access to the Trump administration?
- A profile of Dan Bongino, the right-wing media star named deputy FBI director
- How Wired is stepping into political reporting and covering Elon Musk’s team
- Reporters launch a TikTok-inspired news platform to aggregate independent journalists’ work
- Jen Psaki gets prime-time spot in MSNBC’s new lineup
- Lester Holt leaves NBC Nightly News
- Meta offering bonuses for content creators based on engagement, raising concerns about false information
- USAID funding cuts impact independent journalism around the world
📅 Looking ahead
This week, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, announced that there would be major changes to the newspaper’s opinion section. Bezos said in a post on X that he wants the section to write “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” without opposing viewpoints on those topics. The changes led to the departure of opinion editor David Shipley.
Last fall, a Pew Research Center survey looked at Americans’ political news consumption ahead of the 2024 election. At that time, about a third of Americans (32%) said that The Washington Post was at least a minor source of political and election news for them. A much larger share of Democrats and Democratic-leading independents (45%) than Republicans and GOP leaners (22%) said they use the Post as a source of political news.
📊 Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes from our recent analysis of the social media posts made by news influencers in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Across five major social media sites analyzed, most posts by news influencers that mentioned either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris were posted on X, formerly known as Twitter (79%). No other site produced more than 10% of posts by news influencers about either candidate. Nearly half of the posts on X that mentioned either candidate (48%) were made by news influencers who explicitly display a right-leaning political orientation, while only 28% came from left-leaning influencers.
👋 That’s all for this week.
The Briefing is compiled by Pew Research Center staff, including Naomi Forman-Katz, Jacob Liedke, Sarah Naseer, Christopher St. Aubin, Luxuan Wang and Emily Tomasik. It is edited by Michael Lipka and copy edited by David Kent.
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