NEW: White House Boots Reuters, HuffPost Out Of First Cabinet Meeting

On Wednesday The White House excluded reporters from Reuters, Huffington Post, and Der Tagesspiegel from covering President Donald Trump’s inaugural cabinet meeting. The exclusion extended to an Associated Press reporter and photographer, who had been previously banned from the pool this month.

The AP’s exclusion came after their refusal to adopt the term “Gulf of America” in place of “Gulf of Mexico.” Meanwhile, teams from ABC and Newsmax, along with reporters from Axios, The Blaze, Bloomberg News, and NPR, were allowed to attend the event.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration made a new policy for press coverage in confined spaces like the Oval Office, stating that the White House would now select the media outlets permitted to attend. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt noted that while mainstream media could still report on Trump routinely, the administration would be revising the roster for coverage in more exclusive settings.

The pool system, overseen by the WHCA, traditionally enables a select group of television, radio, wire, print, and photojournalists to attend events and distribute their findings to a broader audience. Reuters, The Associated Press, and Bloomberg News issued the following statement Wednesday:

“The three permanent wires in the White House pool, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Reuters, have long worked to ensure that accurate, fair and timely information about the presidency is communicated to a broad audience of all political persuasions, both in the United States and globally. Much of the White House coverage people see in their local news outlets, wherever they are in the world, comes from the wires.”

“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press. We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle. It also harms the spread of reliable information to people, communities, businesses and global financial markets that heavily depend on our reporting.”

S.V. Date, a veteran White House correspondent for HuffPost who has sparred with Trump in the past, disclosed to DailyMail that the White House had been notified in advance about his role as the designated representative for both newspaper and online print media at Wednesday’s events.

Traditionally, the White House Correspondents’ Association, which includes journalists from a wide spectrum of outlets, has orchestrated the daily pool’s rotation. On this occasion, however, Date was unexpectedly replaced by a reporter from Axios for Wednesday’s pool duty.

“I will say this, I’ve been pooling now for 10 years, since the Obama administration,” Date shared with journalists in the briefing room.

“The number of times that the Obama White House, Trump White House 1, Biden White House, and Trump White House 2 in the times that I’ve pooled so far have asked for a mistake to be corrected in one of my pool reports? Zero. None. Never,” he said.

“The number of times that any of those White Houses have asked for a correction in one of my stories, that’s also zero. So, it’s not about accuracy, it’s not about competence, and I’ll let them explain what it’s about,” Date added.

A White House official later commented to DailyMail that the “[White House Correspondents’ Association] pool that HuffPost was a part of no longer exists.”