Reporters covering Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign described the lack of access to the Democratic nominee as "unlike anything in the past," Politico reported Friday.
With the November election less than three months away, Clinton and Donald Trump have yet to establish a protective pool, which would allow a rotating group of reporters to provide a public account of a candidate’s every move. Campaigns have typically allowed the press to keep a protective pool on the candidate soon after the White House hopeful is named their party’s official nominee.
Clinton, who has expressed weariness of the media after spending a quarter-century in the national spotlight, has held few press conferences since launching her campaign. As of Thursday, the former secretary of state had gone 250 days without holding a formal press conference.
Washington Post reporter Anne Gearan, who is part of a team chairing the Clinton press pool, said that Trump’s decision to ban publications, including the Washington Post, from his campaign events should not serve as a cover for the Clinton campaign to follow suit.
"It’s a false equivalency," Gearan told Politico. "We’re advocating for access for the Clinton press pool. Whatever Trump does is immaterial as far as we’re concerned."
Gearan said the Clinton campaign vowed to set up a protective pool by the end of August, but she said there is "no firm date" or "step by step commitment from the campaign when it will change."
Both Clinton and Trump’s pushback to allowing reporters full campaign coverage bucks years-long tradition.
Politico reported:
The 2016 cycle marks the longest a candidate has gone without a protective press pool for the last three elections. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama’s coverage started in June, Sen. John McCain’s in July, as the Huffington Post noted last month. In 2012, Mitt Romney received protective pool coverage in early August (that year the Republican convention was held the last week of August).
Jeff Mason, president of the White House Correspondents Association and a Reuters White House correspondent, told Politico that despite receptiveness from both campaigns about establishing protective pools in the spring, it now "feels late."
"A protective pool is there to be the eyes and ears of the press corps covering the president or covering a candidate for when news happens," Mason told Politico. "News doesn’t just happen at planned events. It can happen on a motorcade ride between two locations. It can happen anywhere. And the pool is set up to be there for those events. That’s why we push for it."