All Joking Aside, Here’s How Sean Spicer Is Shaking Up the White House Press Briefing -
By LARRY BUCHANAN and KAREN YOURISH FEB. 11, 2017
Less than a month into the Trump administration, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, has upended some
of the longstanding traditions surrounding the nearly daily press conference with Washington reporters.
Mr. Spicer also calls on non-mainstream outlets that may be more critical of the Trump administration, including American Urban Radio Networks, a minority-owned radio station,
and Telemundo, Univision and other Spanish-language news outlets.
“There are voices and issues that the mainstream media sometimes doesn’t capture,
and it’s important for those issues to get as much prominence as some of the mainstream ones,” Mr. Spicer said in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News in late January.
Photograph of the briefing room on Feb. 7 by Doug Mills/
The 49 seats in the photo above (and chart below) have been assigned by the independent White House Correspondents’ Association since 1981, largely
because administrations of both parties wanted to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
A comparison of Mr. Spicer’s first three briefings with the first three by Robert Gibbs,
a press secretary under President Barack Obama, shows how things have shifted.
As he goes around the room, Mr. Spicer typically calls on media organizations
outside of the mainstream before getting to more traditional news outlets.