While answering questions before departing for a campaign event in North Carolina, Vice President JD Vance called out the hypocrisy of media outlets’ complaints about media coverage inside the White House and said not giving hostile media special access is not violating their free-speech rights.
Vance was asked by a reporter, “How is this not an attack on free speech?”
The vice president replied:
They can still report on the Trump White House. They can still get the public reports. They can still, of course, talk to people in the administration and outside the administration. What the president has said is, we’re not going to give you special access inside the White House. The way that I think about it is, if you go back to the Biden administration or the Obama administration, compare, let’s say, Politico to Breitbart. If you actually look at the objective analysis, Politico and Breitbart are, Politico is as anti-Trump as Breitbart was anti-Obama or anti-Biden. Now, why on God’s green earth would Donald Trump be expected to give Politico special access when nobody in the media expected the Biden administration or the Obama administration to give Breitbart special access. It’s about basic fairness.
The recent history of White House media access points toward unprecedented transparency under President Trump and roadblocks and hurdles instituted by the Biden administration.
In 2023, Biden’s press office restricted the number of media “hard passes” to the White House from 1,417 to 975. A Politico story about the culling of journalists’ passes attempted to justify the move, in part by profiling Simon Ateba, an African news correspondent who sparred with former Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during briefings that year.
WATCH — Trump Credits Breitbart News for Fair Coverage While Blasting Fake News Media Outlets:
The story said the Biden White House’s revised policy increased red tape and required journalists to submit their personal information to the White House on a daily basis.
One of the first moves made by recently departed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in January 2025 was to add a New Media seat to briefings, often calling on outlets such as Breitbart News and well-known podcast creators for the first question of the session.
Vance also cited a Newsbusters study that revealed 92 percent of coverage from establishment media outlets was negative.
“What he’s doing is saying we’re not going to give you special access to the White House if you engage in what is effectively propaganda… About 92 percent of the stories that they have on the president and the administration are negative,” Vance said. “That’s not representative of the American people and not representative of public opinion. If you’re going to engage in what is effectively propaganda why would a Republican White House give you special access?”
Trump’s announcement of the organizational ban against CNN, MS NOW, and Politico last Friday led to hyperventilating stories from the outlets when their passes did not work the next day.
President Donald J. Trump shows members of the media the White House helipad under construction on the South Lawn, Wednesday, August 19, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
Early Monday, the outlets raised the stakes, announcing a federal lawsuit to win back their places. Members of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) also joined in the wailing.
The WHCA’s president, Jacqui Heinrich, called on the Trump administration to immediately reverse the decision. “The implications extend beyond these organizations: a standard used to exclude one news outlet because of its coverage could be applied to any outlet in the future,” Heinrich said in a statement.
Additionally on Monday, the remaining TV news outlets announced a boycott of providing coverage of the president’s travel to New York City. Those outlets included ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC.
Heinrich’s own network, Fox News, published an article in December 2025 titled “Trump torches Biden’s press record — opens floodgates of media access in first year back.”
That article stated:
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought a surge in media access following the Biden administration, with hundreds of direct exchanges between a press corps he frequently blasts as “fake news” and a president who rarely ducks a question, according to exclusive data on his first year back in office.
Trump has participated in at least 433 open press events that stretched from official remarks to impromptu gaggles outside of Air Force One to press conferences where the president interacted with the media, as of Monday. The data, compiled by the White House Stenographer’s Office and provided to Fox News Digital, does not include quick exchanges, such as Trump answering a shouted question while greeting a foreign leader at the White House.
“They can still report. They still have the access to free speech. They’re just not going to get an office in the White House anymore,” Vance added in his comments.
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