As White House Limits Access to Press Briefings, Daily Signal Reporter Loses Credentials

by Rob Bluey

Two weeks from now, The Daily Signal’s chief news correspondent, Fred Lucas, will lose his White House press credentials. It’s the latest—and perhaps most brazen—attempt by President Joe Biden to limit media access to what he regularly calls “the People’s House.”

The White House Press Office will implement new rules July 31, when all “hard passes” expire. Lucas (pictured above), holder of a hard pass since 2009, no longer will be able to easily attend White House press briefings or access the sprawling Pennsylvania Avenue campus—as he has done for the past 14 years.

At issue are new rules, announced in May, that limit the number of journalists who are eligible for a White House hard pass and give Biden’s press team greater power to expel journalists it doesn’t like.

The rules require pass holders to first obtain “accreditation by a press gallery in either the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, or Supreme Court.” (See the full email from the White House Press Office at the end of this story.)

The Daily Signal, a media outlet founded by The Heritage Foundation in 2014, doesn’t have press credentials to cover Congress or the Supreme Court, although Lucas recently applied for both. It’s unclear when he’ll receive a response and unlikely he’ll be approved, if history is a guide.

The Supreme Court has a limited number of hard-pass holders—just 25 for the past term. Congressional galleries, governed by a committee of journalists, have their own rules.

Limiting Media Access

Lucas isn’t the only reporter who will be left without a hard pass for the White House in two weeks. The White House won’t say exactly how many others will lose access. Officials also won’t disclose the number of hard passes currently in circulation.

Simon Ateba, the White House correspondent for Today News Africa who regularly spars with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, is among those sounding the alarm.

BREAKING: The @WhiteHouse is changing the rules for press hard passes to target me. But I qualify for all those things as we just filed our taxes, are registered with the District of Columbia and have our address in DC. I studied journalism in college, received two degrees, have… pic.twitter.com/NMvVF4WSaC

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) May 5, 2023

The new rules stipulate that reporters must work full time for “an organization whose principal business is news dissemination.” But the rules go even further by requiring reporters to act in a “professional manner,” “respecting their colleagues, White House employees, and guests,” and “not impeding events or briefings.”

Ateba frustrates not just Jean-Pierre, who refuses to answer his questions at press briefings, but also other journalists in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. Last week, the White House Press Office sent Ateba a warning that he risked expulsion if he continued to interrupt briefings in violation of the new rules.

BREAKING: Following @washingtonpost hit piece meant to prevent me from renewing my hard pass, the @WhiteHouse and @PressSec office just sent me ‘A WARNING LETTER.” Here it is:

Mr. Ateba,

We strongly support the important role that members of the press play in covering the White… pic.twitter.com/7EbS9HDpIW

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) July 11, 2023

Others who don’t meet the White House Press Office’s new criteria will simply lose access July 31. That includes The Daily Signal, which is among the most-read conservative news outlets in America, according to Comscore data compiled by The Righting, a media company.

Lucas, who has covered the White House during the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Biden, has watched both the press office and White House Correspondents’ Association change during his 14 years on the beat.

Previously, Lucas was downgraded from a full member of the White House Correspondents’ Association to an associate member because he didn’t have congressional press credentials. That change, however, didn’t affect his access to the briefing room at the White House.

Lucas later came under fire when serving as the “pool reporter” for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence in 2017.

So the Heritage Foundation is pooling White House events now pic.twitter.com/lAgz12TAo6

— Reid J. Epstein (@reidepstein) March 9, 2017

Although no one complained about the accuracy of Lucas’ reports, The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi questioned whether The Daily Signal was a “legitimate news outlet.” Three years later, in 2020, The New York Times’ Annie Karni wrote a similar story.

‘Unduly Vague’ Rules

Of course, this is hardly the first time the White House and reporters have clashed over media access. During the Trump administration, CNN reporter Jim Acosta and Playboy correspondent Brian Karem were booted from the grounds. They each took their cases to court and eventually won reinstatement.

This time, however, few reporters are standing up in opposition to the new rules. Even the White House Correspondents’ Association “has taken an officially noncommittal stance,” according to The Washington Post.

The Daily Caller reported in May that the WHCA, whose purpose is to fight for access, consulted with the White House Press Office on the new rules.

An unnamed Biden official told the Daily Caller: “As we neared a final decision, we informed White House Correspondents’ Association leadership of our plans and received feedback, as a result of which we made important updates to the policy, like accommodating permalancer and journalists without a residence in D.C.”

Tamara Keith, a White House correspondent for NPR whose term as WHCA president ended Friday, told the Daily Caller at the time: “They told us they were going to do this. We pushed back where we could and did succeed at getting a few small changes. But it very much continues to be their policy and not ours.”

The White House says the new rules will enhance security by limiting access to hard passes. But not everyone is convinced they’ll be successful.

Karem, who was suspended for 30 days in 2019 after a verbal exchange with former Trump aide and current radio host Sebastian Gorka, is among them.

Karem told The Washington Post that “if they’re trying to get rid of a reporter because they don’t like the question or because they think yelling out a question is rude, I’d just refer them to the Acosta and Karem cases. They will lose.”

His lawyer, Ted Boutrous Jr., called the new rules “unduly vague.”

“We fought against the arbitrary suspensions of press passes by the prior administration, which were similarly based on vague standards of conduct that can all too easily be misused to attack and punish aggressive journalism or unpopular viewpoints and shield the White House from rigorous journalistic scrutiny,” Boutrous told the Post.

Biden’s Battles

Since taking office in January 2021, Biden and his press staff have clashed repeatedly with journalists at home and abroad. Just last week, “frustrations boiled over Wednesday in Vilnius, Lithuania, when wranglers and other aides shouted at reporters in an effort to clear the room,” Politico reported.

White House staff didn’t want reporters asking Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy questions, so they shouted over the two principals as reporters were ushered out of the room.

Politico reported in its West Wing Playbook that “members of the pool reconvened outside the meeting and shared their frustration, including with administration officials. Some who spoke with West Wing Playbook described themselves as ‘livid’ and described the yelling over Zelenskyy as ‘unacceptable.’”

Similar situations have played out at the White House, where Biden’s aides are known for a particularly aggressive tone with reporters who don’t abide by their wishes or are flummoxed by Jean-Pierre’s answers.

“She is arguably the least effective White House press secretary of the television era,” a longtime White House reporter told CNN’s Oliver Darcy earlier this year.

In his newsletter analyzing the reporters’ frustrations, Darcy wrote: “She has openly struggled to field basic questions inside the briefing room, relying, in agonizing fashion at times, on her binder of talking points to respond to simple inquiries.”

Biden himself has on many occasions voiced his displeasure with reporters. According to a recent Daily Signal article on Biden’s temper, the president has done everything from call a Fox News reporter a “stupid son of a b—” to berating another who asked a question despite not being on a preapproved list.

Biden, who mostly campaigned for the presidency from his basement in Delaware in 2020, has done far fewer press conferences than his predecessors, averaging only 10 per year. Keith, the former WHCA president, cited that lack of access as one of her biggest…