Better in their words…

Please, Mr. Trump, let some better people into the room.’
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WSJ 11/28/2016

O utsider Donald Trump was elected president in significant part because of his promise to shake up Washington. He’ll soon find that one of the most entrenched forces that object to any change affecting them is the White House press corps. As last week’s meetings with the media showed, a clash is coming.

The clash will go beyond ideology and the media’s dislike of Mr. Trump personally. It will happen because, while the press as an institution is largely in decline throughout the U.S., the White House briefing room is one of the mainstream media’s last bunkers of power. It’s a place where they dominate—satisfied with the traditions and practices that predate social media—even as the press struggles, especially financially, with how news is made and covered today.

The briefing room itself, the place where reporters sit, and the adjacent space in which they are provided offices reflect the power of the mainstream press, based largely on the media-consuming habits of the American people from decades ago. The Associated Press, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News, for example, sit in front-row seats that have their names on them. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the Washington Post and NPR sit right behind them. While approximately 750 reporters hold White House credentials, the briefing room holds 49 seats, and they are occupied overwhelmingly by mainstream media reporters, with barely any assigned to the new dotcom world.

The White House press secretary used to decide who got what seats, but this authority was given to the White House Correspondents Association in the middle of the George W. Bush administration. Nothing prohibits the incoming administration from taking it back. The valuable West Wing real estate occupied by the White House press corps isn’t the property of the press. It belongs to the U.S. government.

The press hasn’t been kind to Donald Trump—and that isn’t its job. That job is to cover the news in a fair manner. But as the Columbia Journalism Review reported in October, campaign-finance disclosures show that those who work in journalism gave $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump, with more than 96% going to Mrs. Clinton.

A stringer for the Los Angeles Times was fired this month after tweeting that he wished “Donald Trump’s life [to] end.” A CNN Headline News show in September blurred out a Trump for president logo from the shirt of someone they interviewed. A casual glance at most front pages and network news lends credence to the president-elect when he complains about his coverage.

A poll of the 2016 campaign press corps, taken by Politico’s magazine in May, showed that while most reporters refused to say who they would vote for, among those who did, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got 13 votes. Only three said they would vote Republican, and only one for Mr. Trump.

In 2013 the Atlantic magazine reported that 24 journalists—not columnists or opinion writers—took jobs with the Obama administration. I suspect many reporters covering the 2016 race had their résumés ready for Hillary.

It isn’t only Trump who is complaining. A September Gallup poll showed that trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” had dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history. An October Pew poll showed that only 5% of the public report they have a “great deal” of confidence in the news media, while 61% have “no confidence” or “not much confidence,” a level surpassed only by the low regard the public has for elected officials.

Reporters are aware of these surveys, but they don’t change. They remain mostly liberal and largely made up of the same elites who couldn’t imagine Mr. Trump winning the nomination, let alone the presidency. Too many live in a bubble in which they talk mainly to similar-minded journalists. They fail to understand that the combination of ideological bias and the loss of public confidence makes them vulnerable to the changes President Trump might seek.

In every era, the nation needs a fair and vigilant press to check the power of the president. Presidents might not like it, but it serves the country well. The daily briefing by the press secretary has long been a TV show, not a serious briefing, but it is still worth the effort. The mainstream media have a role to play, and so do a lot of other outlets. But when the press is too liberal or unfair, the media themselves put what they do at risk.

I don’t know what changes President- elect Trump will make, but he has extraordinary latitude. If he decides to go around the press entirely, abolish the daily briefing, give seats to different reporters, appoint a combative press secretary, or not take a press pool with him to dinner, the reason he’ll be able to get away with it is because the mainstream media lost the trust of the American people.

Mr. Fleischer was the White House press secretary for George W. Bush from Jan. 2001 to July 2003. He now heads Ari Fleischer Communications.