CNN Frets Trump Could ‘Elevate’ Conservative Press

CNN anchor Carol Costello on Thursday worried that if President-Elect Donald Trump opens White House briefings to more journalists, he might “elevate” opinion hosts like Bill O’Reilly to the “same plane” as CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

Costello worried such a development would negatively change the nature of news conferences.

“You’re putting, like, a Bill O’Reilly and a Wolf Blitzer on the same plane if you do that.”

“You’re putting, like, a Bill O’Reilly and a Wolf Blitzer on the same plane if you do that,” she said.

Costello asked former CNN reporter Frank Sesno what it would mean if Trump moves White House press briefings to a larger room to accommodate more journalists.

“Just about anybody who wants to come,” Sesno said. “He means bloggers. He means talk show hosts. He means people from Breitbart News. There will be an entirely different dynamic in that press room.” Sesno declined to acknowledge Breitbart News already has a White House correspondent, who regularly attends press briefings given by the Obama administration in the Brady Briefing Room.

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Asked Costello: “So, if you invite talk show hosts into those briefings, doesn’t that elevate them to the same level as independent journalists?”

Sesno, now the director of School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, agreed that it could.

“And it’s one of the things that confuses people about media, when you put commentators next to reporters,” he said.”And are reporters still reporting? And are they reporting the facts and are they commentators, too?”

It is not the first time CNN has worried about possible changes to White House briefings. Chief media correspondent Brian Stetler worried this week about diminishing the “symbolism” of news conferences in a 49-seat briefing room near the Oval Office.

But Sesno noted on Thursday that the dynamic already exists. He referred to liberal commentator Bill Press, who had a show on CNN for years and has a White House press pass.

“This is sausage-making … It is not always polite or calm or anything like that,” he said. “The White House is first and foremost a political brawl, and the reporters who are there are political brawlers, themselves.”

Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist and CNN commentator, said Americans are troubled by what Trump has said about the press.

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“I think it’s going to be very telling at his first [presidential] press conference who he’s gonna be calling on,” she said. “But I do think this is one of the key conversations that we need to have.”

CNN congressional correspondent Phil Mattingly noted that Trump up to now has continued to grant interviews to adversarial reporters.

“The president-elect still calls The New York Times on a seemingly daily basis right now,” he said. “So they seem to still have pretty good access.”

And Mattingly said Trump would not be the first president to prefer publications that are more favorably disposed to his administration.

“Will they want better access for some of the publications that they feel are more supportive of them? Potentially,” he said. “Other White Houses also tend to feed reporters that they feel most comfortable with. That’s not crazy. That’s not against what we’ve seen.”