Trump May Move Drive-Bys Out of White House

Monday - January 16, 2017

RUSH: Tom in Orlando. Tom, I'm glad you waited. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi. CALLER: Hi, Rush. I wanted to talk about the Washington press corps having a hissy fit that they may have to move out of the West Wing to accommodate more Washington media. RUSH: Oh, yeah! This is a great, great, great story. I'm glad you reminded me of this. CALLER: I mean, these people live in a bubble. They got the election wrong. Ninety-eight percent of 'em supported Hillary and contributed to her, and all they're doing is doing reporting for Washington, DC, and New York. The rest of the country has no media coverage, and, you know, they just recite Democrat talking points. I mean, when Bill Clinton is in or Obama, they're cheerleaders. RUSH: That's right. CALLER: And Obama even assigned seats for his cheerleaders up front so they can have the pom-poms out. RUSH: Right. CALLER: But George Bush is in -- RUSH: Actually, it's the White House Correspondents Association that assigned the seats in the White House pressroom, but it's up to the president who to call on. Let me explain what's happening here. There's two elements of this. The first element is that Sean Spicer -- the incoming press secretary -- and Reince Priebus alluded a couple of weeks ago that they might end the daily press briefing at the White House, and the media had a collective cow. They thought it was an attack on them, an assault on them. "You can't do that! You can't hide from us! You cannot prevent us from examining you and interrogating you every day!" And they said, "No, no. We're just thinking this has been done the same way for so many years, and it's not getting done. We're thinking of ways to change this." And the most recent discussion of this is the possibility of closing the current White House pressroom, which has 49 seats. There are 49 seats for various media to have. And the Trump people, Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus, are saying, "You know what? That's not enough people. There's so many more media now than just the newspapers and the networks." So they're thinking of relocating the press room across the little street there to the Old Executive Office Building, known in parlance as the OEOB, also known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. It is the White House. It is on the White House grounds. It's just a tiny little street separating the West Wing from the OEOB. So gonna put them in there. They've got a room they can handle four times that many people in the press or whatever, and then Spicer and Reince Priebus said, "You know what? We're thinking of letting talk radio hosts have press passes and bloggers, because there's all kinds of people that do media now." And the Drive-Bys are beside themselves. They've already seen their news monopoly whacked by me, talk radio, and Fox News, and now Trump and his gang are talking about letting a bunch of news journalist pretenders in there and granting them equal status with the Drive-Bys! And, by the way, if you put 400 people in a pressroom, that's a recipe for Trump to do another rally (chuckling) not a press conference, which he did a couple press conferences like that. And they're beside themselves. They said, "This is unacceptable! This is not the way it's been done, and you can't do that to us," and they're thinking of doing that to them.