When President Donald Trump flew to the Middle East last week for a victory lap on his phase one Gaza peace deal, it was the first time in more than seven months that a reporter from the Associated Press was part of the traveling pool of journalists aboard Air Force One on a foreign trip.
The White House had barred AP from participating in any pool in February over its refusal to adopt the president’s re-naming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” which led to a lawsuit by the news organization. Gradually, AP journalists have reentered the mix. Still photographers have been part of the pool for months; and press secretary Karoline Leavitt has occasionally called on its reporters during briefings after months of ignoring them.
But the White House is not getting over its fight with another prominent news organization: Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
In July, following the Journal’s report on Trump’s sexually suggestive birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump filed a defamation suit seeking $10 million. Around the same time, the White House barred a WSJ reporter from the pool for Trump’s July trip to Scotland.
Now the White House is again barring the Journal from participating in the pool for the president’s trip later this week to South Korea, Japan and Malaysia, according to four people familiar with the situation who were granted anonymity to share the details.
A White House official, also granted anonymity to discuss the matter, confirmed that the Journal’s travel ban remained in place. “We have maintained [that] as long as the President is in active litigation with a media outlet, they will not be included in the travel press pool,” the official said.
Several other outlets being sued by the White House, including The New York Times, ABC and CBS have still been approved for domestic and foreign pool travel.
“It’s pretty inconsistent,” said one White House reporter from a major outlet who was granted anonymity to speak candidly without fear of retribution. “There are a lot of news org[anization]s they’re frustrated with, but the punishments seem to vary.”
Following its spat with the AP, the White House announced that it would take control of deciding which journalists will be part of the various pool groupings allowed into the Oval Office or other meeting rooms to engage with the president publicly on behalf of their colleagues. That gatekeeping function had long been left to the White House Correspondents’ Association, a group of journalists elected to represent their colleagues.
Although the White House has continued to include a number of pro-Trump correspondents in the pool, officials have told the WHCA that they intended to follow the traditional rotations for print reporters on foreign trips, according to two of the people familiar with the situation. Foreign travel can be too expensive for smaller outlets, given the high cost of travel on Air Force One.
In advance of Trump’s trip to Asia, which begins Friday, a WHCA board member sent a White House official an email specifying which outlets were in line to be in the pool, the two people said. One of the outlets was The Wall Street Journal. But the White House skipped over the Journal as it built a pool for the upcoming trip (POLITICO will be part of the travel pool.)
A spokesperson for the Journal declined to comment. A WHCA representative said that the organization “will continue to advocate for the WSJ.”
While WSJ’s reporters have been barred from foreign and domestic travel pools, they are still allowed to take their turn as “in-town” pooler each month when the president is at the White House. (The Journal’s Meridith McGraw served as print pooler last week.)
While the Journal remains barred from Air Force One, its publisher appears to still have access to the president. Trump reportedly hosted Murdoch and his wife, Elena Zhukova, for dinner at the White House last Thursday, Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright reported this week.
Megan Messerly contributed to this report.
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