Hours after President Donald Trump delivered a speech in which he declared his love of the First Amendment and bashed “fake news,” the White House blocked reporters from a number of news organizations from attending a briefing with White House press secretary Sean Spicer. In a highly unusual move on Friday, reporters from a number of outlets, including The New York Times, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, The Hill, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, the New York Daily News, the Huffington Post, and the BBC were excluded from an on-the-record, off-camera press gaggle. Reporters from Time and the Associated Press boycotted the event in response.

Spicer disputed the characterization of the ban as a retaliatory move, arguing that the briefing was intended to be a smaller gathering of the press pool—wherein only a few media representatives were selected—but that he had decided to expand the group to include other voices, including conservative outlets like One America News Network, the Washington Times, and Breitbart, the far-right Web site once chaired by current White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon. According to the BBC’s Dave Lee, CBS News, which was among the more traditional organizations to attend, agreed to share audio of the meeting with the members of the press who were excluded.

During the White House gaggle on Friday, Spicer told reporters that he believes the Trump administration has “shown an abundance of accessibility” to the press.

The explanation by the White House did little to reassure media outlets that were denied entry to the briefing. “Our most experienced White House reporters have never seen anything like this,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, told The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple. Fox News anchor Bret Baier, whose network has been routinely lauded by the president for its coverage, also tweeted a message of solidarity: “Some at CNN & NYT stood w/FOX News when the Obama admin attacked us & tried 2 exclude us-a WH gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs.”

Both CNN and the White House Correspondents Association issued blistering statements condemning the exclusion. “This is an unacceptable development by the Trump White House,” CNN said. “Apparently this is how they retaliate when you report facts they don’t like. We’ll keep reporting regardless.” White House Correspondents Association president Jeff Mason said in a statement that its board “is protesting strongly” against Spicer’s treatment of the press. “We encourage the organizations that were allowed in to share the material with others in the press corps who were not,” he said. “The board will be discussing this further with White House staff.”

The unusual move by the White House followed the publication of critical stories from CNN and The New York Times, which had both recently reported on allegations of communications between Russia and members of the Trump campaign. On Thursday night, CNN also reported that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus broke protocol by seeking to convince the F.B.I. to discredit news reports about Trump’s ties to Russia, a request that F.B.I. director James Comey denied.

Trump, who has long butted heads with the press and with fact-checkers, has escalated his feud with the media in recent weeks as criticism of his administration has reached a fever pitch. “I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake, phony, fake,” Trump said Friday during remarks at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “A few days ago, I called the fake news ‘the enemy of the people,’ and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources. They just make them up when there are none.”