Jack Posobiec, a far-right activist, podcaster, and early booster of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, has been lucky at least twice. In April 2017, during the first Trump administration, he was granted White House press credentials while working for the Canadian conservative news outlet Rebel Media. At the time, this was news all on its own: Posobiec has associated with white nationalists and promoted a dangerous conspiracy theory that, among other things, ultimately resulted in a gunman shooting up a pizza parlor.
The administration has prioritized far-right outlets and figures with checkered pasts and thin credentials.
Posobiec didn’t last long in the briefing room, spending most of his time sparring with other reporters, lobbing softball questions, and delivering approving commentary from the White House lawn about Donald Trump’s firing of then-FBI director James Comey. He left Rebel Media the next month, after the outlet found he had plagiarized material from white supremacist Jason Kessler, and subsequently co-authored a book praising fascist leaders like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet.
Nearly eight years after his stint in the White House, Posobiec, now a senior editor at Human Events, another far-right publication, was invited by newly appointed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to accompany him on his first overseas trip. Hegseth didn’t give any particular reason publicly why Posobiec had been invited, and in the end, he didn’t go—because he was instead accompanying Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Ukraine, where Politico reported that he was present when Bessent greeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
It’s not just Posobiec: from the moment he returned to office, the second Trump Administration has prioritized giving access and status to an array of far-right influencers and news outlets, including figures with checkered pasts and thin or nonexistent journalistic credentials. In doing so, they have created a swell of flattering media coverage, a gauzy bubble around their every decision, no matter how destructive or incoherent. This new state media displays unquestioning loyalty, and its propaganda pipeline is speedier than ever, ensuring that every executive order or new move by DOGE is greeted with rapturous pseudo-reporting the moment it’s announced.
As part of this new order, the White House press briefing room is now chock-full of conservative podcasters, influencers, and representatives of right-wing media outlets. Nine days after Trump reassumed office, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took the podium for her first briefing to announce that the White House would encourage what she called “new media voices” to apply for press passes, including “independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers, and content creators.”
“Starting today,” she added, “this seat in the front of the room, which is usually occupied by the press secretary staff, will be called the ‘new media’ seat.” To further drive the point home, for her first questions as press secretary, she called on reporters from Axios and Breitbart, who she described as part of the new media landscape. (Breitbart was founded in 2007, and Axios in 2016.) The Breitbart journalist, Matt Boyle, began his question by praising the Trump White House and Leavitt for creating this new access.
“This new crop of people who have been given extremely good access are not journalists.”
“Thank you to you and President Trump for actually giving voices to new media outlets that represent millions and millions of Americans,” Boyle started, before, by way of an actual question, asking if Trump would continue working at “breakneck speed.” (Leavitt merrily affirmed that he would.)
“For the most part, this new crop of people who have been given extremely good access are not journalists in the traditional sense,” says Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and a former public editor for the New York Times.
“They’re closer to propagandists than journalists,” Sullivan adds. “I don’t know if you could call it coverage. It’s positive exposure for the Trump administration. They’ll be part of a cheering squad.”
To contrast with the warm reception rolled out for Boyle, Leavitt also made it clear that the White House planned to have a combative relationship with what she called “legacy media” outlets who hadn’t provided fawning coverage of the president.
“We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that,” she said in the January 29 briefing, while addressing AP journalist Zeke Miller. “We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House.”
In a cutthroat example of retaliation, in mid-February, the AP was barred from briefings, news conferences, and events until they agree use the term “Gulf of America,” the new name Trump has given to the Gulf of Mexico. As a global news outlet, the AP has chosen to continue to use the longstanding and internationally recognized name. On Friday it launched a lawsuit over its exclusion that argued the press agency has a constitutional right to “choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
Leavitt, who is 27, has her own history of producing articles of questionable news value. She was previously paid by allies of Chinese businessman and convicted fraudster Guo Wengui to put her name on op-eds in right-wing American news outlets praising his work. Leavitt did not disclose that Guo allies paid her to write the stories, and at least two of the articles were removed by the outlet Townhall after Mother Jones reported on them. Leavitt, who previously served as Trump’s campaign spokesperson, also appeared in a Project 2025 training video unearthed by the investigative outlet ProPublica, despite having personally denied any links between the campaign and Project 2025.
Other figures in the reshaped White House briefing room include Natalie Winters, a correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room. Winters was also paid by Guo backers to write flattering stories about the Chinese businessman. (In response to our reporting, Winters falsely accused Mother Jones of being a “Beijing propaganda front” in an article for Headline USA, a right-wing site.) The Frank Speech Network, the outlet owned by My Pillow founder and election fraud conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, has not one but two White House correspondents. The Daily Wire has sent Mary Margaret Olohan, the author of a book about people who have, in the words of its subtitle, escaped “the gender ideology cult,” and who has Instagrammed herself partying at Mar-a-Lago.
“We belong in the briefing room,” Olohan declared to other Daily Wire figures during a broadcast from the White House lawn. “We need to be bringing the American public these stories and sharing with them the truth that legacy media has no intention of ever sharing with them.” To date, Olohan’s work carrying out that mission has included tweeting screenshots of executive orders, a rapturous video of Trump walking into the room, and a photo of a list of accomplishments that Leavitt’s staff handed to reporters.
As an example of how the new media seats work, look to former ESPN host Sage Steele, who has become increasingly involved in right-wing media circles after settling a lawsuit against her ex-employer. She was in one of the seats on February 5, when she asked a question about “men in women’s sports,” just hours, as the Wrap noted, before she stood behind Trump at at an event where he signed a transphobic executive order that purported to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
Another person given the seat for a day—clearly meant to be a place of honor for administration allies—was Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of Rumble. Leavitt read a lengthy statement from the podium praising Rumble, which hosts a variety of conservative and far-right content, and reiterated Trump’s enthusiasm for the platform. Two days before Pavlovski made his appearance, the White House had announced that it was launching an official Rumble channel, which is packed with news-light, propaganda-heavy videos, including a recent one titled “America’s Decline Is Over.”
Scoops premised on access to Trump officials can look a lot like administration press releases.
While Sullivan worries the changes in the press room could mean official briefings “may end up being close to useless,” they have conservative media figures crowing. “It’s a new level of surreal,” approvingly tweeted Daily Signal reporter Tony Kinnett, to see his colleagues and friends in front of the podium “ensuring Americans get answers (not NYT & CNN talking points) from White House press briefings.”
Beyond the White House press room, there’s been a shakeup at the Pentagon, which the Department of Defense has described as an “annual media rotation program.” In practice, that has meant booting news organizations out of their longstanding workplaces in the building, including NBC, the New York Times, NPR, and Politico; they’re being replaced with One America News Network, the New York Post, Breitbart News Network, and HuffPost; all of which, besides HuffPost, are conservative outlets.
Even when these outlets are purportedly taking time to cover Congress, the pattern of praising Trump repeats. Last week, a reporter from the Daily Signal accompanied a Republican Congressional delegation to London, to see, as the outlet put it, “just how Trump is shaking things up in Europe.” Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland used the outlet’s presence to pontificate on the “deep state of Europe” and the “lunacy” of what was happening there—apparently without specifying a country or a specific example of lunacy—explaining that Trump had traveled to Europe to make “a call for Western civilization to bring back the ideals of Western civilization and the success of Western civilization.”
Some of the new government’s media allies are even more eyebrow-raising. As NPR reported, far-right figure and former CBS journalist Lara Logan had a starring speaking role in a State Department “listening session” set up for employees and former employees to discuss international aid. Logan’s last mainstream news job, as a host for Fox Nation, ended after she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. During the State Department call, NPR reported, she “charged that foreign aid programs were rife with corruption and demanded accountability.”
Even before Trump took office again, there were signs that far-right and conspiracist figures would be given special access to his presidency. On November 13, shortly after he won reelection, Trump ally and dirty tricks specialist Roger Stone went on Alex Jones’ Infowars show to read a statement from the president-elect, announcing that Tulsi Gabbard would be nominated to serve as the director of national intelligence. Trump allowed Stone and Jones to scoop his own announcement, which he waited to post on his social media network TruthSocial several minutes later.
While the exclusives have continued, scoops premised on access to officials can look a lot like press releases. Take last week, when the Daily Caller reporter broke news, as reporter Amber Duke put it, that the Federal Trade Commission was launching an investigation into “big tech censorship.”
“In case there was any doubt, Big Tech is on notice,” a person cited as a “senior FTC official” was quoted by Duke, in an article mostly focused on the opening of a three-month public comment period. “We do not intend to take our foot off the gas any time soon. The days of censorship and monopolies are over.”
The “new media” architecture is more firmly enmeshed with the Republican establishment than ever before.
Similarly, when the White House rounded up administration officials to appear on local broadcast stations, Glenn Beck-owned The Blaze trumpeted an “exclusive” on what it called “the latest installment of the White House’s commitment to widening the tent of media access beyond traditional legacy media.” The exclusive information seemed to consist of the precise number of local radio and TV outlets involved.
Now that Trump is in office, even legacy conservative media outlets like Fox News are bending normal reportorial ethics to their breaking point to preserve access to Trump. On Saturday, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and a Fox News contributor since 2021, began hosting a new program on the network, titled “My View,” which is explicitly premised on the idea that she has unique access to people in the White House. Her inaugural show featured Leavitt, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. “This White House and administration is full of incredibly impressive women,” Trump declared in her opener. “Join us, hear them out and drown out the noise.”
In 2017, then-BuzzFeed News reporter Charlie Warzel wrote that the right was building “a new media upside down,” an alternate news ecosystem where Trump was celebrated as a hero. In his first administration, that new media also flooded the White House press briefing room, including far-right outlets Gateway Pundit and, briefly, conspiracy empire Infowars. Like Leavitt, press secretary Sean Spicer also spent time deriding the “legacy” media outlets in the room, infamously chiding them for accurately reporting on the size of the crowds at Trump’s inauguration. Manosphere figure and Pizzagate promoter turned pseudo-journalist Mike Cernovich also had clear proximity to sources in the White House, as the New Yorker wrote at the time, leading him to produce something that looked like journalism, albeit always with a pro-Trump or anti-Obama angle, and often with inaccurate claims about its news value.
The difference today is that the “new media” architecture is both larger and more firmly enmeshed with the Republican political establishment than ever before. The old upside down is clearly Washington’s new terrain.
Still, Sullivan says that legitimate news organizations should remember the many people who are passing through that dismal landscape looking for real information. “There are millions and millions of well-intentioned, good citizens who need good journalism and who appreciate it and who deserve it,” she says. “It’s not all the cesspool. It’s not all propaganda. And it’s not all lies.”
