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00:00Let's take you to the US, because earlier this week, President Trump signed an executive order entitled Ending Taxpayer Subsidisation of Bias Media, which threatened to cut the federal funding to NPR, National Public Radio and PBS, the public broadcasting service.
00:14Both organisations preparing to challenge it legally.
00:16Now, Trump's administration argue it's outdated. It's against press freedom.
00:20He's criticised both NPR in the past and PBS, saying that they're, quote, radical left monsters.
00:24Well, in this week of 100 Days of President Trump, we can also look behind the scenes of 100 Days inside the press room.
00:31Change is being made. The new right-wing media has been welcomed in, including the White House press correspondent for Steve Bannon's war room, Natalie Winters.
00:39She's been speaking to CNN this week, who asked whether she was really a journalist or a propagandist.
00:46Right now, the briefing room, the seats are, you know, big networks up front.
00:50You're hoping that that will be rearranged, that outlets like yourself might have a more prominent seat here?
00:57Definitely. If it were up to me, I'd kick a lot of these outlets out.
01:00I view my role here more as sort of reporting on not so much the White House, but really the media.
01:06But to the people, and I'm sure you see this online every single day, who say you don't deserve to be here because you're not a real journalist.
01:14What's your response to them?
01:16Well, I'm pretty sure the group of people in there spent, what was it, four years covering for someone who was essentially dead, and that's being charitable in my description of him, a president by the name of Joe Biden.
01:26So to all those people who are apoplectic over having new media voices, you guys failed, and that's why we're here.
01:32Caroline, Natalie Winters, I should say, wanted to chuck a few people out of there.
01:36Let's bring in Fraser Jackson, France 24's White House correspondent.
01:39Fraser, great to have you on the programme this evening.
01:42Looking back at some significant changes, talk us through the dynamic, what you've witnessed in the past 100 days and what it's like right now in there.
01:52Things have shifted significantly.
01:54Before the Trump administration this time and for the last 100 or so years, the access to the White House was basically controlled by a non-profit group of journalists called the White House Correspondents Association,
02:06which we kind of, everybody had to pay to be a member of, but then we had democratic elections where we would vote for who we wanted to be our president, who we wanted to represent the TV, radio, the newswires, the photographers, all different kind of genres of media.
02:20And they were the ones who drew up the seating chart for the briefing room.
02:25They were also the ones who controlled the press pool.
02:28So the group of 13 or 21 journalists who go into the more intimate parts of the White House, like the Oval Office and like the East Room, that was all controlled by the White House Correspondents Association.
02:39So the WHCA say that it should not be up to the government to choose the journalists who cover the administration.
02:47And that was a bedrock principle that every administration up until this administration has adhered by.
02:53Well, the Trump administration this time have really tried to seize control of who gets access to those press areas.
03:00So they are now putting the wires, so people like Associated Press, Reuters News Agency, the Agence France-Presse, AFP as well, and Bloomberg.
03:10They are now in the wider rotation with more outlets, so over 30 outlets who rotate every day to report on what the president's doing.
03:18But in a very matter-of-fact way, there's no political spin on the pool reports.
03:22They get sent out to thousands of people, thousands of news outlets, thousands of people on Capitol Hill and other governments as well.
03:29They are very factual things, but even that has started to change somewhat.
03:33It's also started to impact the foreign press as well.
03:36That's the control that the White House has tried to seize over the wider press pool.
03:40They are now trying to seize over the foreign pool as well, which I am a member of, which is how I get access to those more intimate spaces.
03:47So they're now bringing in more foreign journalists into that rotation as well.
03:52And on top of that, there's also been a big influx of non-traditional and non-legacy media, as the White House likes to put it.
04:01The right-wing influencers now are coming into the White House in a much bigger number.
04:06And the White House is even now starting to hold separate briefings for some of these influencers as well.
04:11Caroline Leavitt has held a couple of these over the course, even just of the last week.
04:15But a lot of those influencers do tend to skew more right-wing, and some of them even have connections to the administration or to Donald Trump more directly.
04:25So it's been a significant shift.
04:28The White House says that it's doing it to be more transparent and to get more eyes on the White House.
04:33They say a lot more Americans are not getting their information through those traditional media outlets, which, of course, is true.
04:40A lot of these influencers have millions of followers, and some of them have followings that some outlets could only dream of.
04:47But it is now bringing into question the whole idea of fact-checking and more unbiased coverage of the White House,
04:55because a lot of these influencers are asking questions which are a lot more of like a softball for the administration, really.
05:02So it's certainly a new, challenging media environment, and those traditional and legacy media outlets need to figure out where they stand in this new environment.
05:11Well, let's talk about who's doing the air traffic control for this, which is Caroline Leavitt, once an intern under the first administration of Donald Trump.
05:18Now in the firm favour, it seems, in the way she's interacting, directing, deflecting the press, and suggesting that she's also tipped for a Cabinet post.
05:25She's been talking to the new media this week.
05:28This was a TikTok hit she did on her life inside the White House.
05:32This is my office. I have, obviously, photos of myself with the President.
05:39You also have a picture of me, and that's my baby, my nine-month-old son.
05:42That was from our senior staff swearing-in ceremony.
05:45And then this picture here is from my first briefing.
05:47This is my fun little cork board.
05:50This is a seventh-grade class from Georgia who came to visit.
05:53Their dad is one of my colleagues here in the White House, and they asked if I could go speak to the students,
05:56and they wrote me and signed this cute little thing.
05:59Another picture of my baby on his first Air Force One flight.
06:02And then this is a meme that I love.
06:04It's a man pointing at a brain, and it says, no thanks, I won't be needing that because I believe everything the legacy media shows.
06:10So, look, we want critical thinking around here.
06:14What's your take on the ascent of Caroline Levitt, and what are you seeing behind the scenes?
06:18I think Caroline is a great spokesperson for Donald Trump.
06:25She is very competent.
06:27She is very switched on, a very smart woman.
06:29She knows how to get Donald Trump's message across.
06:32Of course, her role there is to represent the President and to put his message across to the media.
06:37And in private, she's very nice, but she's very friendly.
06:42She's very amicable to us as well.
06:44We've had great meetings with Caroline.
06:46I was in a meeting with her just last week.
06:49But, of course, the real kind of worry from the wider press corps is that there is a shift away from what's kind of been the status quo
06:57and more a tilt towards the magosphere, as it were.
07:02There was a kind of unspoken agreement through many generations and many administrations over the last hundred years or so since the WHCA has been there.
07:10There's a real kind of a push and pull, really.
07:13The White House understands that they need the press, and the press understands that they need the White House.
07:17So they can say things on camera, but behind the scenes, there are still a lot of dealings between the two and a lot of, whether it's, you know, information or simply logistical things on how to cover the president, where his next trip is going to be.
07:32Those kind of things have always been ongoing.
07:35And it's kind of been a game that we've been kind of playing, a back and forth game.
07:38This time around, it feels much more that actually there is the game ongoing, but actually the kind of underlying rules of that game have changed somewhat.
07:47And I think Caroline kind of represents that.
07:50But she is a great press secretary in the sense that she gets Donald Trump's message across and she is doing the job that he wants her to do.
07:58Talk us through the ethical questions this week that have been raised by the ABC interview with President Trump for the hundred days,
08:04because the headlines over whether it was the president or ABC that decided the interview with Terry Moran.
08:09And that matters because of a suggestion that ABC might have stepped beyond the journalistic ethical boundary,
08:14which is that an organisation says, this is us doing the interview.
08:17It doesn't matter who's doing it.
08:18You don't get to decide.
08:19But this is what triggered the questioning.
08:22Let's move on.
08:23Wait a minute.
08:24Hey, Terry, Terry, Terry.
08:25He did not have the letter MS-13.
08:28It says MS-13.
08:30That was Photoshop.
08:31So let me do that.
08:32That was Photoshop.
08:32Terry, you can't do that.
08:34Hey, they're giving you the big break of a lifetime.
08:36You know, you're doing the interview.
08:37I picked you because, frankly, I never heard of you, but that's OK.
08:41I picked you, Terry.
08:43But you're not being very nice.
08:44I've seen Associated Press and others talk through and quote some of the journalistic bodies saying that if that's the case,
08:51it's not the right ethics for an organisation to also be allowing Trump to decide.
08:55But it could also be bluff.
08:56And I don't think we've heard from ABC, have we, on this one?
08:59No, it's still kind of unclear as to how this happened.
09:05I will say I'm quite good friends with one of the ABC White House correspondents.
09:09So Terry Moran is one of their bigger names, but he's not somebody who you see at the White House very often.
09:14So it was, you know, somewhat of a surprise to me and my other colleagues when we saw that he was the person conducting the interview.
09:20But that interview has also become quite kind of iconic now in the fact that it showed Donald Trump believed the fact that the photo of those tattoos, which showed MS-13,
09:32he thought that was a real photo, that the letters MS and the numbers 13 were written on Abrego Garcia's hands.
09:40Of course, it has been shown that that is Photoshop and those are not real images.
09:46But that has really kind of put forward a whole question as to whether Donald Trump understands exactly what's happening in this whole situation.
09:53So an interesting choice by ABC, but also an interesting choice by Terry Moran as well,
09:59because if that had happened in an interview that I had been doing with the president,
10:03I'd like to think that I would have drilled down a bit further into that to try to really understand whether the president did actually believe
10:09that that was a real photo and not Photoshop.
10:13So, again, the fact that he tried to move on from that is also interesting.
10:17Yeah, we all wanted to see the image, didn't we?
10:19So he was looking at the image.
10:20He could say, that is Photoshop.
10:22It doesn't say MS-13.
10:24Fraser, a delight to talk to you.
10:25Let's see what state you're in, what state the White House is in, in the next 100 days.
10:29Fraser Jackson, our correspondent at the White House.