As Mr. Kirby himself has noted, State Department correspondents work a bit differently from those at the White House. They do not often shout their questions, and television cameras are absent from many of the most important briefings. “Many have covered the beat for decades,” he noted over the weekend. “They know the complexities, the history.” (Not all of us took the “decades” part as a compliment.)

The group that has covered the State Department is heavy with former foreign correspondents and war correspondents who have lived around the world, have sources in foreign capitals and write books about the global challenges the country faces. Their hotel-bar conversations have been known to run to wonkish topics like deterrence theory.

So it might not be surprising that Mr. Tillerson doesn’t want them in the back of his airplane, talking to his staff and probing how the new administration’s approach to North Korea and China might differ from what predecessors tried. As he said in that interview with the one journalist he brought along — a reporter from the Independent Journal Review, a conservative-leaning website that had never covered a State Department trip before — Mr. Tillerson has something more one-way in mind.

“I view that relationship that I want to have with the media, is the media is very important to help me communicate not just to the American people, but to others in the world that are listening,” Mr. Tillerson was quoted as saying. “And when I have something important and useful to say, I know where everybody is, and I know how to go out there and say it.”

There is something to be said for his approach. Clearly, Mr. Tillerson wants to shake up the foreign policy elite, and that starts with a press corps that feeds in the very swamp this administration says it wants to drain. He also says he is saving money by using a smaller plane (though news organizations pay steeply for each employee who flies with the secretary).

This early in Mr. Trump’s tenure, many policy decisions have not yet been debated thoroughly within his administration, so as Mr. Tillerson noted on Saturday, there is not much for him to say. And there would be considerable risk in getting out ahead of his sometimes mercurial boss. (That boss, Mr. Tillerson conceded, went ahead and posted a Twitter message complaining that “China has done little to help!” without running it past him first.)

Yet there is something else that Mr. Tillerson’s policy forgoes: the often useful symbolism of top American officials’ being seen to travel with a free and intrusive press asking questions that leaders do not want to hear.