White House press corps dean Tom DeFrank described Monday‘s White House press briefing as more tense than any he could remember. | Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the Press ‘The tension in the briefing room has been building for months’ Tom DeFrank, who has covered Washington since the Johnson administration, says relations between White House and reporters are the worst in his memory.

The relationship between the White House and the reporters covering it has grown more tense than at any point in the last 50 years, according to White House press corps dean Tom DeFrank, who began covering Washington in the Johnson administration.

This week marked a new low, he said.


“There’s not a lot of good will,” said DeFrank, a contributing editor at National Journal, who also spent years at Newsweek and the New York Daily News. “I think basically they have no use for us and, for the media’s part, there’s a feeling that we’ve been misled for a long time on many different subjects. I know a little bit about adversarial relationships and it will always be an adversarial relationship and it should be, but this relationship is more adversarial than any I can remember.”

Tension has been growing for weeks between the White House and reporters. In addition to President Donald Trump’s usual attacks on the press, briefings have grown less frequent—there have been just four in June—and shorter, often running 15-20 minutes, when in previous administrations, they could stretch over an hour. And Trump, along with his top officials, including press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have grown increasingly brazen in peddling falsehoods—particularly about the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border.

All of it came to a head earlier this week, in a Monday White House press briefing that DeFrank described as more tense than any he could remember.

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“I can’t remember one as contentious from both sides of the barricades as that one, and I did dozens of briefings during Watergate,” DeFrank said. “I don’t want to equate this with Watergate, but this is the most contentious I can remember since the Nixon era. But this to me was even more toxic.”

When the White House press office sent out its daily guidance on Sunday evening, no briefing was scheduled for the next day, though one was added on Monday morning, scheduled for 1:15 p.m. That was later pushed back to 3:30, and then 4:00, and then 5 p.m., as word came down that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen would be briefing the press.

Frequent delays and logistical snafus—including confusion over access at Trump’s North Korea summit in Singapore—have grated on reporters working to hit deadlines and cover the whirl of news the Trump era has produced. “The president’s schedule and the press secretary’s schedule just changes with the wind,” one White House reporter said in an email. There’s little advance planning the reporter, added, “And it’s driving everyone nuts.”

As the delay stretched on Monday, ProPublica posted a recording of crying children who had been separated from their parents. Reporters listened to the audio as they waited, creating, as one reporter there described it, a somber mood. The scene was unlike anything in memory, another reporter said.

“The tension in the briefing room has been building for months,” said DeFrank, who typically tries to make it to two briefings per week. He said the combination of such an emotionally charged issue with the press corps’ building frustration led to Monday’s briefing being “in a class in itself.” A crystallizing moment for him came when Nielsen said she had not seen the photos of children being kept in cages that had been released by her own department and featured all over the news—a claim that beggared belief.

“I was kind of fixated on ‘Have you seen these pictures?’ ‘No I haven’t seen these pictures.’ That was amazing,” he said.

There was no briefing on Tuesday, nor is there one scheduled for Wednesday.

