White House takes control of press pool that covers Trump

The White House on Feb 25 stripped journalists of the nearly century-old power to decide which of them cover US presidential events, with US President Donald Trump boasting that he was now "calling those shots" on media access.

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Mr Trump's spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt made the surprise announcement at a daily briefing, saying that the independent White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) would no longer have a "monopoly" on choosing members of the "press pool".

The press pool is a small group of reporters that covers the US president in often cramped spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One, and shares its material with other news organisations.

The WHCA said the decision "tears at the independence of the free press".

The 78-year-old Mr Trump was in the Oval Office with a pile of red baseball caps on his desk saying "Trump was right about everything" when he was asked to comment on the move.

"We're going to be calling those shots," Mr Trump said about media access.

The move comes amid an escalating battle between the White House and the Associated Press (AP) news agency, which Mr Trump has barred from presidential events in a row over his renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.