So Daniel sent us this one, and it's a topic I don't think gets nearly enough attention. He's asking about the traveling press pool — that small rotating group of journalists who follow the head of government everywhere, on the official plane, in the motorcade, into the Oval Office. He wants a comparison between how it works in the US and Israel, what it's actually like day-to-day for the journalists involved, whether financial and logistical dependence on the government compromises their independence, and how the whole arrangement has evolved alongside security apparatus and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. There's also a real ethical tension at the heart of all this, which I think is the most interesting part.
I've been sitting with this one for a few days and the more you dig into it, the weirder and more fascinating it gets. Because on the surface it sounds like a prestige assignment — you're on Air Force One, you're in the room when history happens. And then you read the actual accounts from journalists who've done it and it sounds like the most tedious job imaginable.
Right, there's this first-person piece from a reporter who joined the Obama pool on Martha's Vineyard. She spent five hours sitting at the entrance to a golf club waiting for Obama to finish his round. Five hours. And then they went into what's called "pool hold" at another location. Thirteen-hour day, total.
The WHCA — the White House Correspondents' Association — actually has a guide to the White House beat, and they describe pool duty as involving long shifts and short turnarounds, vast stretches of boredom, physical exertion when you have to run with luggage and gear, restrictions on bathroom breaks and meals, and hours sitting in passenger vans. They call it "press purgatory" in the guide, which is a remarkable phrase for an institution to use about itself.
And by the way, today's episode is brought to life by Claude Sonnet four point six, which is worth mentioning because the irony of an AI writing a script about press access and information control is not lost on me.
Noted. But here's the thing about why the tedium matters, because Steven Portnoy, who was WHCA president, made this argument that I think is genuinely compelling. He said you never know when the world will need good information about precisely where the president of the United States is and what he is doing at any moment. Pool reporters were in the motorcade when JFK was shot. They were watching when Reagan was nearly assassinated. They helped write the history of September eleventh when George W. Bush was being evacuated to military bases. None of those incidents were scheduled.
So the boredom is the cost of being present for history when it happens without warning.
Which is an interesting way to think about journalism more broadly, but especially about this institution. And to understand how we got here, you have to go back to the FDR era, because that's really where the modern press pool begins.
Walk me through that.
The White House Correspondents' Association was founded in nineteen fourteen, but the traveling pool concept crystallizes in the nineteen thirties around Roosevelt. The WHCA historian George Condon has documented this — three wire service reporters joined FDR on his train to Warm Springs, Georgia, where he went regularly to receive therapy for his paralysis. They were with him when he died there in nineteen forty-five. That's the seed of the whole institution.
And then it formalized from there as the security apparatus expanded.
That's the key dynamic. As the Secret Service built out its protective bubble — more advance teams, more motorcade vehicles, more restricted zones — the press pool became the only practical solution to a real problem. You can't have three hundred journalists in close proximity to the president for security reasons, but you also can't have zero journalists, because that's a different kind of problem. The pool is the negotiated middle ground. Thirteen journalists on Air Force One, vetted and managed, who share their dispatches with the entire press corps.
And there's a literal physical artifact of this history in the White House. The Brady Briefing Room — the one where you see press secretaries standing at the podium — is built over FDR's indoor swimming pool. Nixon had it covered over in nineteen sixty-nine because the growing television press corps needed more space. The pool is still under the floor.
Which is either a great metaphor or just a fun fact, depending on your mood.
I'm going with metaphor. The old press access buried under the new press access.
So the thirteen-person domestic pool on Air Force One breaks down very specifically. Three wire reporters — AP, Reuters, Bloomberg. Four photographers from AP, Reuters, AFP, and the New York Times. Three network TV correspondents. One radio correspondent. Two print reporters, one of whom rotates through eight different outlets sharing a single seat. And this is where the financial architecture gets interesting.
Because the news organizations are paying their own way.
Which is both the protection of independence and the source of a different kind of dependence. Outlets traveling on Air Force One reimburse at the lowest available commercial fare — unrestricted, fully refundable, calculated seven to fourteen days in advance. For the separate press charter that follows the president, costs are split pro-rata among all registered journalists. The whole billing system runs through a contractor called Air Partner LLC, which handles the charter aircraft, hotels, and ground transportation. And failure to pay is grounds for denial of future access.
So you're paying your own way, which means you're not taking government money, but the infrastructure — the hotels, the filing centers, the ground transport — is all arranged through the White House Travel Office.
And that's the paradox at the core of the whole system. You're financially independent in the narrow sense, but logistically you're completely dependent. On an international trip, the White House Travel Office is coordinating with the State Department and foreign governments to get journalists into places they couldn't access on their own. Without that infrastructure, covering a presidential foreign trip would be essentially impossible for most outlets.
And the pool reports themselves — this is something I didn't know before digging into this — they go to a listserv that includes at least ten thousand recipients. Congressional aides, administration officials, political allies. The WHCA guide actually flags this and says it's "worth keeping in mind" when writing pool reports.
Which is a politely worded way of saying: remember that your supposedly independent journalistic dispatches are also being read in real time by the people you're covering. The pool report from inside the Oval Office goes to the press corps and simultaneously to the White House communications team.
That's a genuinely strange arrangement.
And it raises the access journalism critique, which has been around for decades. The intimacy of the pool — sharing planes, motorcades, filing centers, sometimes catered meals in press filing rooms — creates relationships. President Clinton was so gregarious with pool reporters that one journalist reportedly feigned sleep when he saw Clinton coming to the back of the plane, just to avoid getting pulled into a long conversation.
Which is funny, but also illustrates the problem. If you're close enough to the president that you're pretending to be asleep to avoid chatting with him, you're not exactly operating from a position of adversarial independence.
Now the key mechanism that historically protected independence — the one that made the whole system defensible — was that the WHCA controlled the rotation. For over a century, the press itself decided which outlets got into the pool. No administration could systematically favor friendly outlets because they didn't control the list.
And then February twenty twenty-five.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House press team would determine who gets access to spaces like Air Force One and the Oval Office. She framed it as opening things up to "new media" — podcasts, streaming services — but the WHCA president at the time, Eugene Daniels from Politico, put it plainly: in free countries, leaders don't get to pick the people who cover them day in and day out.
And the AP situation is the clearest illustration of what that control looks like in practice.
The Associated Press had a policy of not using "Gulf of America" — the Trump executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico. The White House banned the AP from the press pool. A federal judge later ruled that unconstitutional. But rather than simply restore the AP's access, the administration escalated and removed all three major wire services — AP, Reuters, Bloomberg — from their designated daily pool slots, pushing them into a general rotation that drastically reduces their proximity to the president.
So the three outlets that have the broadest reach, that share content with smaller news organizations that can't afford to be at the White House themselves, get demoted.
The WHCA's statement on this was pointed. They noted that AP, Bloomberg, and Reuters play an integral role in coverage of the presidency and that their ability to share news instantly with millions of readers and smaller organizations is unmatched. And separately, the administration withheld at least two pool reports from the official mailing list — essentially editing the historical record in real time by preventing unflattering information from reaching the wider press corps.
That's the one that I think doesn't get enough attention. Withholding pool reports. Because these things are meant to be the contemporaneous record of what the president is doing and where he is. If the administration can decide which ones go out...
You've changed what happened. Not dramatically, not in a way that rewrites history the way a lie does, but you've introduced a gap. And gaps in the record compound over time.
Let's talk about Israel, because the parallel is striking but the mechanism is different.
So Israel's equivalent of Air Force One is the Wing of Zion — a Boeing seven sixty-seven, registration four X dash ISR, operated by Squadron one-twenty of the Israeli Air Force. It completed its first flight after conversion in November twenty nineteen, cost approximately three hundred million dollars. Israeli journalists have traditionally joined the Prime Minister on these flights, with the Shin Bet — Israel's internal security service — conducting security checks at Ben Gurion Airport starting at six in the morning before journalists are allowed to board.
And here's the structural difference from the US that I think matters a lot. Israel never had a formal independent body like the WHCA managing the rotation.
Which means there was never a firewall. Access has always depended on the goodwill of the Prime Minister's Office. The WHCA's independence was the product of a century of institutional norm-building. In Israel, that institution never developed in the same way, which means Netanyahu's press pool restrictions aren't a rupture with a norm the way Trump's were — they're more of an escalation within a system that was already more fragile.
Walk me through what Netanyahu has actually done.
September twenty twenty-five — Netanyahu excluded all journalists from the Wing of Zion for his UN General Assembly trip to New York. The stated reason was "technical arrangements related to seating and security." The Israeli Journalists' Union protested. And the Ynet report on this noted it was the second consecutive US visit in which he'd excluded journalists from the official plane.
So it wasn't a one-off.
And before that pattern became established, there was already a precedent for using access as punishment. After a Ynet report about alleged tampering in the spokesman's office, Channel Thirteen's diplomatic correspondent Moriah Asraf was barred from boarding the plane. Direct retaliation for unfavorable coverage. That's the exact same logic as the AP ban — access as a lever for shaping coverage.
And then February twenty twenty-six, the Kolyohin case.
This one is genuinely murky in a way that makes it hard to evaluate. Nick Kolyohin is an Israeli-Russian freelance journalist who contributes to RT — Russia's state-controlled television network. He'd been approved for the Wing of Zion for Netanyahu's Washington trip to meet President Trump. Shin Bet agents removed him from the plane minutes before takeoff. The PM's Office said the security authorities decided not to approve his participation due to security considerations, but couldn't provide further details. The Shin Bet said it couldn't address the reasons behind individual decisions.
And the ambiguity is the point, isn't it? Because Kolyohin had immigrated to Israel as a child, served in the IDF. The RT connection is real, but is that a security concern or a political one?
That's exactly the question the system is designed to prevent you from answering. When the Shin Bet is doing the vetting, and the Shin Bet doesn't explain its decisions, there's no way to distinguish a genuine security call from a politically motivated exclusion. And the context that makes this more troubling is that the Shin Bet admitted in twenty twenty-two to tracking Israeli journalists using cell phone data from telecom companies. So the security apparatus that's vetting press pool access is also the security apparatus that's surveilling the press.
That's a different level of concern than anything in the US context.
The broader pattern in Israel is worth laying out, because the Wing of Zion restrictions are just one piece of it. Netanyahu's government has bolstered Channel Fourteen, which the Israeli media watchdog The Seventh Eye has documented as regularly broadcasting misinformation. Legislation has been introduced targeting prominent TV news channels. Al Jazeera was banned and its offices raided as, quote, "a mouthpiece for Hamas." Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, has been boycotted. And since October seventh twenty twenty-three, nearly all foreign journalists have been barred from Gaza — a blanket prohibition that the Committee to Protect Journalists challenged in Israel's Supreme Court in October twenty twenty-five.
So the press pool restrictions are embedded within a much wider media environment that's moving in the same direction.
And unlike the US, where you have the WHCA as an organized independent counterforce, Israel's press corps has a more atomized relationship with power. The Attorney General warned that proposed media reforms create "a real concern about commercial and political influence and involvement in the work of media organizations." The structural buffer is weaker.
Here's what I keep coming back to, though. You mentioned that in twenty twenty-nine — sorry, twenty twenty-nine, I mean twenty-nine, the Obama White House briefly tried to exclude Fox News from a pool interview. And the other networks objected and the administration backed down. That's the norm functioning as it's supposed to.
That's a really important data point. The networks — including outlets that were not exactly Fox News sympathizers — said no, we don't do this. If you exclude one of us, you exclude all of us. And the administration relented. That's the bipartisan norm holding.
Versus now, where you have sustained, systematic control of the pool by the Trump administration and no comparable pushback from loyalist outlets. Which means the norm isn't just being violated — it's being replaced by a different norm.
And a Pew Research Center survey found that only thirty-six percent of Americans said they'd heard a lot about Trump's relationship with the media — down from seventy-two percent in March twenty seventeen. So the public salience of this issue has dropped dramatically even as the actual restrictions have become more severe.
Which might be the most alarming finding in all of this. The first term generated enormous attention to press freedom issues. The second term has generated less attention while doing more damage to the institution.
Let's bring in the technology dimension, because the twenty-four-hour news cycle has fundamentally changed what the press pool is and what it's for.
Because it used to be that a pool report might be filed hours after an event.
Today, print poolers are expected to file near real-time updates. The WHCA guide says they "serve the entire press corps with near real-time pool reports." You're in a van, you've just watched the president have a brief exchange with a foreign leader — a "pool spray," in the jargon — and you need to have filed before the motorcade reaches the next location. The pressure is completely different from what it was even twenty years ago.
And there's a whole vocabulary around this that I find weirdly compelling. "Lid" — official notice that the president won't be seen in public for the rest of the day, pool is dismissed. "Full lid" — no further announcements even by email. "Pool hold" — waiting in vans. "Pool spray" — brief access at the start or end of a meeting. "Gaggle" — informal Q and A near Marine One, which is apparently very loud, making questions hard to hear.
And "wranglers" — the junior White House press assistants who herd the pool. They're the ones who shout "thank you, pool!" when the president is done engaging, which is the signal to stop asking questions.
The beast is the presidential limousine, but the SUVs used on weekends are not the beast, which is a distinction I find oddly important.
The twenty-four-hour cycle has also raised the stakes of pool access in a way that makes the current power struggle more intense. A pool report from inside the Oval Office can go viral within minutes. The value of being in the room has increased, which means the value of controlling who's in the room has also increased.
And then the "new media" argument gets used as cover for that control.
The Trump administration's framing — that the WHCA's rotation was too restrictive of podcasters and streaming services and digital-native outlets — has a surface plausibility. The pool system was designed in an era of three networks and a handful of wire services. The media landscape is genuinely different now.
But the solution to that problem is to expand the pool in a way that's managed by the press itself, not to hand control of the rotation to the White House.
And critics have pointed out that the "new media" outlets being given access are not exactly chosen for their editorial independence. The practical effect is that the White House has replaced a press-controlled rotation with a White House-controlled one, and dressed it up as democratization.
Let me ask you something about the financial architecture, because I want to make sure we've fully unpacked this. The fact that small outlets can't sustain the cost of constant pool participation — what does that actually mean for who's in the room?
It means the pool is inherently biased toward major institutional media. The cost of flying a correspondent on Air Force One, paying for hotels and ground transport through the White House Travel Office, maintaining the billing relationship with Air Partner LLC — that's sustainable for the New York Times or Reuters. It's not sustainable for a regional paper or an independent outlet. So the pool, even in its most idealized form, represents a particular slice of the press corps.
Which creates a tension with the "new media" argument, because the outlets being brought in by the current administration aren't small independents struggling with cost. They're loyalist outlets that happen to use a digital format.
The financial barrier to pool participation has always meant that the pool is not representative of journalism as a whole. It's representative of the organizations that can afford to be there. And the organizations that can afford to be there have their own editorial interests, institutional relationships, and incentives that shape coverage in ways that are hard to measure.
What are the practical takeaways from all of this? If you're someone who consumes news coverage of the presidency, or of the Israeli government, what does understanding this institution change about how you read that coverage?
The first thing is to understand that pool reports are a mediated product. They're written by journalists who are physically dependent on the infrastructure of the government they're covering, whose presence in the pool depends on an institution — either the WHCA or the PM's Office — and who are filing in near real-time under significant pressure. That doesn't make pool reports unreliable, but it means they're not a transparent window onto power. They're a particular view from a particular position.
And the rotation system — or who controls it — matters enormously for what that view shows you.
When the WHCA controls the rotation, you get a press-managed imperfect system. When the White House controls the rotation, you get something fundamentally different, even if the pool reports look similar on the surface. The independence of the institution is what gives the output its credibility, and once that independence is compromised, the credibility is compromised in ways that aren't always visible in individual reports.
The second takeaway, I think, is about the historical record function. Pool reports and pool footage aren't just journalism — they're the contemporaneous documentary record of what the president did and where he was. When the Trump administration withheld pool reports from the mailing list, that's not just a press freedom issue. It's a historical record issue.
And for Israel specifically, the absence of a formal independent body managing press access means there's no institutional record of who was excluded and why. The Kolyohin incident is documented because journalists covered it. But how many exclusions happen quietly, without anyone making noise about them?
The Shin Bet angle in Israel is the one that I think deserves more attention than it gets in Western coverage of Israeli press freedom. Because you can debate whether Netanyahu's media preferences are appropriate or not, but the security service tracking journalists' phones and then vetting them for access to the Prime Minister's plane — that's a different category of concern.
It conflates security and information control in a way that makes them indistinguishable from the outside. And the Wing of Zion as a platform gives the PM's Office enormous leverage. If you want to cover Israeli foreign policy at the highest level, you need to be on that plane. If being on that plane depends on the Shin Bet not having concerns about you, and the Shin Bet is tracking your communications, then the security apparatus has become a gatekeeping mechanism for journalism.
The parallel between Trump and Netanyahu here is striking but the mechanisms really are different. Trump seized control of a formal institution that had been independent for a century. Netanyahu is operating within a system that was always more informal and dependent on goodwill, and he's simply withdrawn that goodwill more aggressively.
Same result, different path. And in both cases, the press corps is covering it, which is something — but the public attention that coverage generates has declined from the first time these norms were challenged. People have habituated to the restrictions.
Which might be the most important long-term consequence. Not any single exclusion or withheld pool report, but the normalization of the idea that the government has a legitimate interest in shaping who covers it.
And once that's normalized, rolling it back requires a new administration to actively choose to restore the independence of the institution. There's no automatic reset.
All right. This has been a genuinely fascinating one. The institution is so much weirder and more ethically complicated than it looks from the outside, and the parallel between what's happening in the US and Israel — two democracies, two leaders, two different mechanisms, same trajectory — is exactly the kind of thing that deserves more examination than it usually gets.
Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this whole operation running. And big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power the show — we genuinely couldn't do this without them.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you're enjoying the show, a quick review on your podcast app really does help us reach new listeners. Until next time.
Take care, everyone.
