Ari Fleischer: Trump should upend the White House briefing room

President-elect Trump’s attempt to fundamentally transform the way Washington works, as seen in his selections for cabinet secretaries, won’t be complete until he transforms the White House briefing room.

That hallowed hall, which holds 49 seats for 49 of the most important reporters in America, is a throwback to the 1980s. In the 21st century, when Americans consume news in ways that would have been unrecognizable 40 years ago, the briefing room is the last bastion of the mainstream media’s heyday, when everyone watched and read them because there was no alternative.

Despite the fact that the readership and viewership of newspapers and network news shows has plummeted, the first rows of the briefing room are occupied by reporters from the Washington Post, New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN, FOX News and a few others, just like it was 40 years ago when those seats were installed by President Ronald Reagan.

It doesn’t matter that most of those news outlets have been famously inaccurate in their reporting — from their nonstop coverage alleging Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, to the credibility they gave to the bogus Steele Dossier, to their happy dismissal of a laptop computer that contained damaging information about Joe Biden, to their refusal to countenance that COVID may have originated in a Chinese biolab, to their failure to cover President Biden’s health decline, to their false reporting that Trump called for Liz Cheney to be executed by a firing squad — the media in that room keep failing to do their most basic job.

They don’t tell the people the truth about what’s going on. They routinely publish false stories that make Trump look bad, and hide those that hurt Biden.

Now they expect that they should not be subject to scrutiny or change in their professional behavior. They don’t care how wrong they are — they want the status quo to continue so they can do it to Trump again.

Why on earth should he let that happen?

The briefing room, and the two-floor office area behind it, is a taxpayer-funded space in a government building. More precisely, it is White House office space that since the 1980s has been given rent-free to the media to house the tiny cubicles from which they work. The chairs in which they sit are the property of the government, not the media. That means the White House can properly do as it sees fit.

So long as the press was fair and neutral — which they haven’t been in a very long time — it made sense to let the mainstream media sit in those seats. So long as those reporters were the ones who reached the most Americans, it made sense for the White House to communicate to the country through those reporters.

But in 2025, the mainstream media should not sit in those seats.

The Trump White House should assign those seats to reporters from conservative media outlets, outside-the-Beltway outlets, podcasters, talk-radio reporters and respectable social media influencers, who are more in tune with the news-consuming habits of the country today — and they’re not part of an activist press corps that’s out to damage Trump. The rest of the media must of course still attend the briefing and ask questions, but they should no longer dominate and define the briefing room.

Unlike the passive, acquiescent press corps that meekly and mildly covered Biden, with the exception of Fox News, the existing press corps will turn into full-throated opponents of Trump in his second term. Briefings will be television shows in which reporters jockey to prove they are the most antagonistic to Trump and his press secretary. This dynamic brought fame and fortune to many reporters during Trump’s first term. There is no good reason to do it again in his second.

The role of the media in America is changing. Reporters now take sides. Trump would be foolish to empower those who stand against him. The press will pretend that they are fair, neutral and accurate, while every poll of the American people shows that hardly anyone believes that.

It’s time to stop living in the 1980s. Change who sits in those seats and who gets the questions. Reorient the definition of news away from what the mainstream media thinks it is to what the media that’s more representative of this generation says it is.

And stop pretending the media is fair. They’re not. If Trump really wants to change Washington, he needs to change the status quo and unseat the mainstream media.

Ari Fleischer served as the 23rd White House press secretary under President George W. Bush.