Ari Fleischer

[Commentary] Relations between the White House press corps and the president are almost always adversarial, but in President-Elect Donald Trump, we have something new. Based on the campaign and the transition, the press is highly adversarial to Trump and he is happy to return the favor. As two former White House spokesmen for two very different presidents, we sat in the same West Wing office that is equidistant from the Oval Office and the briefing room where the White House press corps gathers daily.

Despite the rancor that exists today between the media and Trump, we believe there are ways to make their relationship beneficial to the public they both serve. So, what to do differently?

[Mike McCurry and Ari Fleischer are former presidential press secretaries. McCurry served as press secretary to Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1998, and is now a Distinguished Professor of Public Theology at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Fleischer was press secretary for George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. ]

[Commentary] Outsider 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 recent meetings with the media showed, a clash is coming.

The clash will go beyond ideology and the media’s dislike of President-elect Trump personally. It will happen because, while the press as an institution is largely in decline throughout the US, 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 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 US government.

[Fleischer was the White House press secretary for George W. Bush]