The White House Correspondents' Association Departure Was Long Overdue

Why did the Trump Administration end the Correspondents’ Association’s decades-long hold on the press briefing room?

Simple: traditional media’s relevance has been fading for years, and the 2024 landslide confirmed it. Voters didn’t need the self-anointed, traditional gatekeepers to tell them what’s what—they got their truth from the unfiltered, robust free-speech corners of the internet.

The numbers don’t lie. Tucker Carlson's X posts can rack up 50 million views. But ABC’s evening news? One-tenth of that. Joe Rogan’s podcast clocks hundreds of millions of listens while CNN’s evening primetime lineup struggles to top 400,000. 

The fact is, the briefing room’s “elite” are regularly outpaced by a single X influencer’s daily hot take. 

After 30+ years in PR, I’ve watched the media landscape shift firsthand. Today’s audiences don’t wait for curated narratives—they dig for themselves. The 24-hour news cycle has become 24 minutes, if even that long.

That’s why this move wasn’t a surprise; it was a reckoning.

And in many ways, the traditional press earned it. For the past eight years, we've seen traditional media peddle heavily partisan narratives while simultaneously burying bombshells that didn’t fit their anti-Trump script.

Remember the Steele dossier, a Clinton-funded fiction novel that received Watergate-level news airtime before unraveling as fantasy. Or the “very fine people” hoax, where President Trump’s words were twisted, ignoring the full context? Or the Covington kid smear? Nick Sandmann’s smirk became a national media crisis until the tape showed the press had skipped key facts. 

The mainstream media also downplayed major legitimate news. Hunter Biden’s laptop? Influence peddling emails showing that access to the “Big Guy” was being sold to China and Ukraine for millions—but this was dismissed as “Russian disinformation” until even Biden’s ex-team could no longer deny it.

Biden’s mental decline? Obvious to anyone with eyes, yet the media framed it as “stumbles” while X users posted unedited clips of the emperor’s naked frailty. Remember when Special Counsel Robert Hur was called "insensitive," "unprofessional," and "politically motivated" by the press for reporting that Biden’s mental state was that of “an elderly man with a poor memory” who struggled to recall key dates, such as his vice-presidential years or his son Beau’s death?

Then there was the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” -- a $1.9 trillion climate-spending boondoggle that juiced inflation to 40-year highs, but the press called it a win.

The border crisis? Lawfare against Trump? Biden's garaged classified documents? The heavily edited Kamala interview masking her gibberish? The list goes on.

Meanwhile, X and its raw, messy forums lit up with truths. No filter, no spin—just Americans hashing it out, sifting signal from noise.

And that’s where the 2024 election was won: not in the briefing room’s stale echo chamber, but in the digital town square. Voters didn’t need babysitters wearing press passes—they simply went out and found the information themselves.

So, yeah, the White House yanked the reins. Good. The Correspondents’ Association isn’t some sacred priesthood; it’s an organization clinging to an outdated monopoly. Yesterday wasn’t a power shift—it was an acknowledgment of a shift that happened long ago. 

The old guard forgot its job: inform, not indoctrinate.  The world has changed, and the public has moved on.