White House press corps

The White House press corps is a group of journalists from various news media who cover the president of the United States and the officials of the executive branch. Members of the White House press corps often travel with the president and attend daily briefings at which they ask questions of the president’s press secretary and other government officials. Their role ultimately is to sort through competing narratives to bring the public a comprehensive report on domestic and international events from the White House. Over time this has resulted in a sometimes contentious relationship between the administration and the press corps.

History of the press and the presidency

Journalists have covered the presidency, along with other news from Washington, D.C., from the time of George Washington. The growth of interest in covering the government grew significantly in the 19th century and led to the creation of a dedicated White House press corps. Starting in 1896 the White House designated a space in the building for journalists covering the president. A designated official would give briefings on everyday information, provide advance copies of speeches, and arrange for interviews with the president.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt saw the press as a way to get a message out to millions of newspaper readers. He convened informal meetings with his “newspaper cabinet,” as he called them. Pres. Woodrow Wilson initiated semiweekly talks, as well as the modern-day news conference format, in 1913. (He was surprised when a hundred reporters attended.) Initially, the meetings were seen as useful for both the president and the correspondents, but Wilson claimed in 1913 that certain newspapers had published off-the-record comments about a diplomatic crisis and threatened to end the press conferences. In 1914 the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) was formed with a commitment to the White House to police its members and a commitment to its members to negotiate working conditions with the White House. Over the years the association has grown in influence, and its annual fundraising dinner, which was first held in 1921, often attracts A-list celebrities. In 2009 the dinner earned the moniker nerd prom.

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Initially the White House press corps included only newspaper reporters, but that changed as the means by which people got their information did. In the 1940s radio correspondents were included, followed by television reporters in the 1950s. With the dawn of the Internet at the end of the 20th century, digital reporters joined the press corps. The president’s news conferences went from taped television, during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, to live television, beginning with Pres. John F. Kennedy.

As of 2025 the White House Correspondents’ Association had some 900 members representing about 300 news organizations, including traditional news organizations, digital-only outlets, media organizations founded after 2000, and local outlets focused on covering the White House’s impact on states.

•The White House: A Visual History

On April 25, 2026, Pres. Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, and other top U.S. government officials were attending the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in Washington, D.C., when a shooter opened fire near a security checkpoint and tried to enter the ballroom where the dinner was being held. The president, first lady, and other officials were swiftly evacuated. Secret Service and other law enforcement agents subdued the gunman, identified as Cole Tomas Allen of California. He was armed with a handgun, a shotgun, and several knives. One Secret Service agent was shot during the altercation with the gunman, but he was wearing a ballistic vest and survived. Allen, 31, was later charged with attempted assassination of the president.

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The relationship between the president and the press

Daily press briefings take place in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room (named for Pres. Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, who was seriously injured during the 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan’s life). The briefing room is in the West Wing of the White House, and the briefings have been televised since the administration of Pres. Bill Clinton.

Members of the White House press corps who have seats in the briefing room or who make up the “press pool” at presidential events have typically been decided by the White House Correspondents’ Association. A pool is used in the Oval Office or other small settings. It then becomes the responsibility of the pool reporter to share what happened and what was said with other press corps members. In 2025 the administration of Pres. Donald Trump announced that it would handpick reporters who could participate in the pool.

The relationship between the president and the press—and what is fair game to report—has changed dramatically over time. As recently as the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Kennedy, personal matters, including issues of health and intimate relationships, were considered off-limits and irrelevant to covering how the president was doing his job. As a sign of how different the times were, CBS reporter Marvin Kalb was once tackled by Secret Service agents who didn’t want him to see a woman going into Kennedy’s hotel room. Kalb wrote later that “never for one moment did I even consider pursuing and reporting what I had seen and experienced that evening.”

That approach may seem naive in the wake of the coverage of Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. But even in the 1990s the mainstream media was reluctant to report on such salacious personal events. Only when Matt Drudge reported in 1998 on his Internet site the Drudge Report that Newsweek was holding off on publishing a story about the relationship did it become fodder for traditional news outlets.

That is not to say that members of the White House press corps have always been deferential to the president. The relationship between reporters and Pres. Richard Nixon was particularly fraught, with Nixon at times ordering his staff not to talk to reporters from certain publications, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But the adversarial nature of Nixon’s relationship with the press corps was never more starkly on display than in a famous exchange between Nixon and CBS’s White House reporter Dan Rather in 1974. As Rather stood to ask Nixon a question at a news conference in Texas, the journalist was greeted with applause. Nixon said to Rather, “Are you running for something?” As laughter died down, Rather shot back: “No, sir, Mr. President, are you?”

“The enemy of the American people”

During his first administration, Trump seemed to actively seek to undermine the reporting of the White House press corps and journalists in general by labeling certain news organizations “fake news” and “the enemy of the American people.”

That rhetoric ratcheted up appreciably after he won the 2024 election. After Trump signed a 2025 executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, he banned reporters from the Associated Press from the White House because the news organization continued to use the Gulf of Mexico designation.

The administration’s position that some reporters were unfair in their coverage gained credibility when Terry Moran, a veteran White House correspondent for ABC News, used the phrase “world-class hater” to describe Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in a social media post in June 2025. Moran, who had recently interviewed Trump, was fired by ABC. The network said Moran’s action was a “clear violation of ABC News policies.”