OXON HILL, MD.—Sean Spicer, press secretary to President Donald Trump, was asked in December whether the administration would ban particular media outlets they didn’t like, as Trump did during his campaign. Spicer said no.

“We have a respect for the press when it comes to the government, that that is something you can’t ban an entity from,” he said. “Conservative, liberal or otherwise, that’s what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.”

Well.

In another escalation of Trump’s assault on the media, Spicer barred major media outlets that have broken damaging stories about the president from attending an on-the-record briefing at the White House on Friday afternoon.

According to Politico, the outlets included CNN and the New York Times, the two media entities Trump has most frequently denounced; the Los Angeles Times; BuzzFeed; Politico itself; and the BBC.

“Appalling,” Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a statement. “This is an undemocratic path that the administration is travelling.”

Perhaps uncoincidentally, the decision came less than 24 hours after CNN broke the news that Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had asked FBI leaders to publicly deny a New York Times story that alleged Trump associates had made repeated contact with Russian intelligence during the campaign.

Priebus’s contacts would have violated previous administrations’ policies against presidential staff asking the FBI about specific cases. Trump fumed about the CNN report on Twitter on Friday morning, complaining about “leakers within the FBI itself,” while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called for an investigation into Priebus, saying he may have done something “illegal.”

“Political interference in the integrity of an FBI investigation into the conduct of White House officials is a grave abuse of power,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Trump regularly banned particular media outlets from his campaign rallies in response to coverage he deemed unfair. But the exclusion of critical outlets from official presidential briefings is without modern precedent, and it produced a chorus of condemnation from journalists, media executives and advocates for government transparency.

“Nothing like this has ever happened at the White House in our long history of covering multiple administrations of different parties,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said in a statement.

The uproar may have been the very purpose of the provocation.

Andrew MacDougall, former director of communications for Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, said the Trump team seems to be antagonizing the media so the administration can “then point to the media whining about it.” Trump ran on an anti-Washington slogan, “drain the swamp.”

“Any time they can point to the swamp complaining about how the swamp is treated, that’s a win for them,” said MacDougall, now an Ottawa Citizen columnist, who warned of long-term harm to the democratic system.

Spicer’s move came less than four hours after Trump repeated, in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that he believes some of the media is “the enemy of the American people.”

When he made that claim on Twitter a week before, retired Navy Admiral William McRaven, who led the raid against Osama bin Laden, called the sentiment perhaps “the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”

The political benefits to Trump’s onslaught are clear: distraction from difficult stories like the one on Priebus, advance discrediting of future revelations, and a public focus on an institution that, in MacDougall’s words, “everybody hates.” Much of the Republican base is united by hostility to the “mainstream media,” and polls suggest other Americans aren’t fond either.

Trump’s CPAC condemnation drew loud applause. On Breitbart News, the right-wing website once run by Trump’s chief strategist, a large headline read: “FAKE NEWS: LEFTIST MEDIA OUTRAGE OVER WHITE HOUSE ‘EXCLUSION’…AFTER YEARS OF IGNORING IT.”

All presidents play favourites with the press, providing extra information to friendly outlets and denying co-operation to their critics; the administration of Barack Obama was harshly critical of Fox News, which occasionally accused him of denying its reporters access. But there does not appear to be a recent precedent for punishing critical outlets with banishment from general briefings usually open to all.

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It is not obvious that Trump’s offensive is a wise political move. In a Quinnipiac University poll this week, 61 per cent said they disapproved of how Trump talks about the media; only 35 per cent approved.

The administration’s tactics are reminiscent of those of late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who excluded the Toronto Star from at least one briefing and attempted to hand-pick the attendees at a 2014 press conference.

The Spicer briefing, which was held off camera, was attended by the Trump-friendly Breitbart, Washington Times, Fox News and Wall Street Journal, as well as ABC, CBS and Bloomberg, which served as a pool reporter providing information to others. The Associated Press and Time magazine boycotted in protest.

Since he began his campaign, Trump has alarmed observers of authoritarian regimes with his efforts to undermine public confidence in democratic institutions and low regard for norms of transparency and factuality.

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