So, Trump refused to honor the media’s traditional ‘protective pool’ when he went to DC yesterday…

Yesterday, the White House Correspondents Association raised a flag on President-Elect Trump’s refusal to allow a so-called ‘protective pool’ for his visit to DC. A protective pool is a small group, often just one reporter, who goes with the president virtually everywhere they go outside the White House. Go to a fundraiser, go to play golf, go out for dinner, there is at least one reporter assigned by the pool system to be there with the president.

Why? Anything can happen. Some incident of great historic moment can happen, there can be a threat on the president, anything. The idea is that you want at least one journalist there to report what happened. Needless to say, in the overwhelming number of cases that person just records the exact time the President arrived and departed, a few pieces of color and that’s about it.

The pool reporter files that report to every news organization in the pool. TPM is part of the DC pool but not the traveling pool.

This whole system is run by the White House Correspondents Association which, yes, is the same group that puts on the rather ridiculous but entertaining White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Now, the WHCA spends a lot of time obsessing about what I would call access formalities - often to the detriment of more substantive and significant journalistic issues. In an of itself this protective pool issue is a pretty marginal one, certainly while Trump is the president-elect. But it’s not in and of itself. Trump has been notoriously, historically opaque through the campaign. He’s the first candidate in decades never to release his tax returns. He spent much of the campaign not just vilifying the press but actually inciting supporters against his traveling press. Any effort to turn back the unofficial norms that allow news organizations to scrutinize and inform the public about the president should be greeted with serious and grave concern.

Things like clampdowns on FOIA, exclusion of meddlesome, non-friendly reporters from the White House briefing room and a host of other things would be much more ominous. But this happened on the new President-Elect’s second day with the title. That’s a bad sign.

Another potential worry - what if this new administration just goes dark and starts arbitrarily taking away access?

Would any of these news organizations stand up to them?