every television network walked out of the white house on monday. the reporter still filing works for a gay newspaper.

via the Washington Blade and the Advocate, with the Associated Press wire via PBS NewsHour, and the Blade's own 2021 and 2020 reporting.

The strangest thing about the White House on Monday was how quiet it was.

The president had a new helipad to show off, granite, presidential seal, built on the South Lawn. He walked out to it. He appears to have said something. According to the Associated Press, "if he had words to mark the occasion, however, it was impossible to hear them over the noise of his waiting helicopter," because the people who normally capture clean audio at these things had decided not to come. He did not answer the questions reporters shouted at him. He got on Marine One and left, and later posted that the maiden voyage from the "newly built, and very beautiful, Heliport" had gone off nicely.

So there is footage of the leader of the free world talking, and no record of what he said, because five television networks are in a fight with him and the one pool camera that was supposed to be there belongs to a company he threw out of the building.

what actually happened

On Friday, Trump announced he was barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico over coverage he did not like. On Saturday, three reporters went to work: Betsy Klein of CNN, Akayla Gardner of MS NOW and Cheyenne Haslett of Politico. Klein's and Gardner's badges had been deactivated. Haslett's pass was taken off her. On Monday morning the three outlets sued, telling the government they were going to court "to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes." The case landed with U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, whom Trump nominated in his first term, a detail the president complained about before Kelly had ruled on anything.

Then the rest of the press corps did something it almost never does, which is act like a group. The television pool is five networks taking turns with one camera and sharing the pictures. CNN's turn was Monday. CNN was not allowed in. So ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News all declined to cover the president at all, and said why: "The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government." The White House Correspondents' Association president, Jacqui Heinrich, who is Fox News's senior White House correspondent, called the revocation a violation of the First Amendment. Fox News. Boycotting.

Vice President JD Vance's framing, per the Blade, was that nobody is banning anyone: "He's not banning media outlets...we're not going to give you special access if you engage in what is effectively propaganda."

who was left in the room

Here is the part the wires are burying at the bottom.

The print pool still went out on Monday. Somebody has to write down where the president went, what time the motorcade left, whether he took questions, what the lid was, so that every outlet in America has a shared factual record of a day it could not all attend. That job on Monday belonged to the Washington Blade, and its reporter Joe Reberkenny filed the dispatches, down to the ribbon-cutting at the helipad. The Blade, founded in 1969, is the only LGBTQ news outlet in the White House press pool. The other print outlet still filing was the Daily Caller.

Sit with the arithmetic for a second. Three national newsrooms locked out, five networks walked, and the continuous written record of the American presidency on Monday was kept by a gay paper founded the same year as Stonewall.

it took decades to get the chair

None of this was handed to them, and the receipts are in their own archive.

The Blade earned a place in the in-town pool rotation in 2013. In April 2020, its White House reporter Chris Johnson was on pool duty and was asked to give up his assigned seat in the briefing room. Seating in that room is set by the Correspondents' Association, not by the White House. Johnson declined to move. He was then threatened with the Secret Service, and still did not move. Jim Acosta's verdict at the time: "Chris Johnson, thank goodness for him, refused to get up out of his seat. So, it took almost an act of civil disobedience to foil their plans."

It was not until January 2022 that the Blade got a designated seat of its own, the first LGBTQ publication ever to have one, shared on a weekly rotation with the Boston Globe, sitting in the seventh group next to the Daily Caller and EWTN. Editor Kevin Naff, at the time: "This was decades in the making and a credit to the hard work of Chris Johnson and Lou Chibbaro Jr. before him."

Decades in the making, for half a chair.

We have spent a lot of this month writing about the gay press as a thing that is being hollowed out, most recently when the entire editorial staff of Out and the Advocate had to publicly take on their own board. This is the other half of that story. The institutions are fragile, underfunded, frequently owned by people who should not own them, and on Monday one of them was the last one doing the most basic job in American journalism while the billion-dollar operations were in court or on strike.

Nobody at the Blade is going to get a movie out of this. They filed the lid and went home.

Update, Sept. 24: a judge restored the three outlets' access, and the gay press had its own fight about the pool in the meantime. Here is how it ended.