When the Trump administration announced in February that it would handpick the reporters who get access to the White House — stripping that power from the century-old White House Correspondents’ Association — the association of journalists condemned the move as tearing “the independence of a free press in the United States,” declaring that “in a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”

Yet, just eight days later, Washington state’s own Capitol Correspondents Association willingly chose to give up its own influence over which reporters get access to the Legislature, handing that gatekeeping role solely to the same legislators they cover.

That decision came after two right-wing former Seattle-area TV reporters — Brandi Kruse and Jonathan Choe — sought media credentials to access certain parts of the state Legislature earlier this year. After their requests were denied, they threatened to sue under the First Amendment.

Faced with a choice of either weathering an expensive lawsuit or endorsing the kind of media figures their guidelines had long excluded, the correspondents association took a third option: Tell the Legislature they would no longer perform the screening role they had for decades.

“We don’t have lawyers,” said association president Jerry Cornfield, a reporter for the Washington State Standard. “We chose not to litigate on behalf of the Legislature. It’s their building. They ultimately control access to the chambers. We were not going to fight their fight for them.”

In the weeks since, the Washington state Senate has placed temporary new restrictions on reporters and the state House is weighing its own set of rules.

The fight over press access in Washington state illuminates the mounting pressure on legislative correspondent associations nationwide in an increasingly fractured media landscape. Already weakened from years of newsroom cuts, these associations are being challenged from two flanks: from legislators who want to strip away access from traditional reporters and from independent — and often controversial — media figures who want that same access.

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What plays out in Washington state, whether in the Legislature and potentially the courts, could set a precedent for similar battles across the country.

“Now that there are so many independent journalists out there, politicians are taking it upon themselves to be the judge of who is and isn’t a journalist based on whether they like the political slant of the publication,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for journalists and whistle-blowers.

Blurred lines

Kruse and Choe have broken multiple stories using journalist tools like public records, but their opinionated and aggressive approach often targets populations that conventional journalists sometimes treat sympathetically — unauthorized immigrants, transgender people and other reporters.

For example, where many reporters use the phrase “gender-affirming care” when reporting on the debate around transgender health care, Kruse and Choe call it “mutilation.”

But this latest fight has given Kruse and Choe an opportunity to portray themselves as the true defenders of press freedom and the Olympia press corps as abandoning it.

“I never thought I’d see, from the White House down to the statehouse here, politicians dictating the terms about who gets in and who doesn’t,” Choe told InvestigateWest.

Cornfield argues that the correspondent association was never truly a “gatekeeper.” The ultimate power to choose who gets allowed in the chambers had always rested with the Legislature.

Yet for a half-century, the Legislature had left credentialing decisions up to the press corps. It works the same way in Idaho and Oregon.

Oregon Capital Chronicle editor Julia Shumway, president of the Oregon Legislative Correspondents Association, wrote in an X post last year that their own capitol credentialing processes were crucial so “activists with cell phones and no ethics or standards don’t get to masquerade as reporters.”

In Idaho, a conservative think tank called the Idaho Freedom Foundation launched its own media outlet in 2010, naming it the Idaho Reporter, as a way to get press passes in the Legislature. It was Idaho’s Capitol Correspondents Association that rejected that ploy.

But as the media landscape has changed, these standards have become trickier to enforce.

Until 2009, Washington state’s Capitol Correspondents Association only offered credentials to reporters who worked for newspapers and licensed TV or radio stations. But with the growth of new media outlets, legislative newsletters and reporting nonprofits, the definition had to change.

“It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work,” the state’s Capitol Correspondents Association’s updated guidelines said. “Blurring that line would raise questions about the motives of everyone in the press corps, and risk having the Legislature revoke or restrict the access we have maintained in the public interest for many years.”

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That standard required journalists seeking press passes to be working for an entity that is “doing news for the sake of news alone,” specifically excluding someone who works for a “think tank’s blog.”

That requirement appeared to exclude Choe, who’s been covering homelessness for the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank that got its start by arguing that a divine intelligence was behind the origin of life.

Choe’s coverage has often been controversial in the Northwest. He has been accused of antagonizing — even getting into a physical altercation — with the left-wing protesters he frequently covers.

He was ousted as a KOMO TV news reporter after, without station approval, he produced an upbeat livestream and photo montage of a Proud Boys rally, a far-right organization that has brawled with far-left militants on the streets of Seattle.

Now unshackled from a broadcast news sensibility, enough of Choe’s videos have violated TikTok community standards, he said, that he’s been permanently banned from the platform.

“My content wasn’t brand-safe enough,” Choe said.

But Choe insists he’s still a journalist, pointing out that he’s also a freelancer for right-wing outlets like Daily Wire and Newsmax.

By contrast, when Kruse is accused of having strayed from traditional journalistic ethics prohibiting political activism, she repeatedly insists she’s not a journalist.

In November 2021, Kruse quit her reporter job at Seattle’s Fox 13 to launch her own podcast, telling her audience that she couldn’t effectively do her job when she “had to balance everything I said and did and wrote against this range of mainstream considerations.”

Less than two years later, Kruse not only endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert last year, she estimates that she drove about 6,000 miles around the state to speak at his rallies. She estimates she’s been paid to speak at 10 Lincoln Day dinners, the annual fundraisers for local Republican parties.

She’s officially an ambassador of Future 42, the right-wing nonprofit that sponsors a segment on a “mutually agreed upon topic” each week of her podcast, though she said they don’t have a say over her show’s content.

The Olympia correspondent association’s guidelines, however, specifically exclude would-be reporters “involved with a party, campaign or lobbying organization” from being accredited as a reporter.

But Kruse maintains that being open about her biases actually makes her more ethical than traditional media outlets.

“What’s worse?” Kruse said. “Bias in favor of conservatives and openly admitting it, or having a media press corps that’s biased in favor of the party that’s in power and not admitting it?”

‘Not ideal for anyone’

Two years ago, Kruse reported that Choe was being excluded from some press events, in part because the governor’s office was using the correspondent association’s guidelines to make its own access decisions.

So this year, Choe said, he teamed up with Kruse to take a “preemptive strike” and hire a “high-powered law firm” to challenge the association’s criteria.

After the association decided to simply let the Legislature develop its own standard instead, officials in Olympia scrambled to make new rules. In the Senate, effectively anyone could now get a press pass and sit at the press table, so long as they filled out a form online to identify themselves as a reporter.

But to get access to the Senate’s wings — a crucial setting for journalists to connect with senators — reporters had to secure explicit permission from Republicans to report on the Republican side, and from Democrats to report on the Democrats’ side.

Aaron Wasser, communications director for the Washington Senate Democrats, said that the Senate didn’t even want the job.

“This is something that got dumped in our lap during probably the busiest time of the session,” Wasser said. “As we were passing the rule on the floor, Jerry [Cornfield] was right there, and I’m like, ‘There’s still time to take it back, Jerry!’ … This is not ideal for anyone.”

Some reporters with experience covering the Legislature expressed concerns about the change, but most in the media saw little impact from the new rules. Legislative leaders gave the entire existing Olympia press corps a blanket pass to each side of the aisle.

But when Choe tried to test the new rules last week, holding a new pink press pass — issued by the Legislature to grant him partial access — Wasser himself blocked Choe from attending a Senate Democratic press conference in the wings.

“You’re not a reporter, Jonathan,” Wasser said on video recorded by Choe. “Good luck with your fearmongering.”

The interaction became fodder for a story in multiple conservative publications. Since then, Wasser has acknowledged that he’d screwed up and said Choe is welcome to get access to the chamber as long as he gives a heads-up to legislative staff.

“We’re just kind of trying to figure this out as we go,” Wasser said.

Both Kruse and Choe were officially credentialed to report on press conferences on both sides of the Senate last week.

Bernard Dean, chief clerk of the Washington state House of Representatives, said that reporters who’ve been previously issued press passes have continued to be allowed to operate in the House, but that a formal credentialing process still needs to be developed.

“It does put us in an awkward position of determining who is press,” Dean said. “It’s why multiple states throughout the country rely on the capitol correspondents’ position to issue those credentials.”

Shumway, the Oregon Capital Chronicle editor, has seen how having a Legislature control who can cover them creates problems. When reporting on the Arizona Legislature, she watched lawmakers craft bespoke new rules intended to cut out certain longtime reporters who caught the ire of powerful politicians.

“We also had them inviting absolute cranks — from outlets like the Gateway Pundit — who do not do any kind of fact-based reporting, who were standing alongside us and heckling the actual journalists covering the Legislature,” Shumway said.

If there needs to be access rules, Kruse argued that they should be about decorum or behavior, not about a definition of journalist.

“I would argue that I need more First Amendment protections than a mainstream journalist does in Olympia,” Kruse said. “Whose speech would the government be more eager to suppress: my speech, or a mainstream journalist’s speech? Probably the speech that’s the harshest on them.”

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Free speech rules

At the national level, it’s mainstream journalists who’ve had their access rights come under attack. Both Kruse and Choe say the Trump administration was wrong to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico by the name Trump has insisted upon, the “Gulf of America.”

Last week, a federal district court ruled that Trump had violated the Associated Press’s constitutional rights.

“What is not allowed is viewpoint discrimination,” said Stern, the press freedom advocate. “Journalists can’t be selected for exclusion because of what they say or because of their political slant.”

For the last five years, legal battles have unfolded in multiple states over this issue.

In 2021, the Alaska Governor’s Office settled a media access lawsuit from a nontraditional media personality, a former state Senate candidate who had been denied access to the traditional media’s rotating press pool.

On the other hand, that same year, a 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case determined that the governor of Wisconsin could, in fact, seek to exclude those with “entanglement with special interest groups, or those that engage in advocacy or lobbying” from press briefings.

But trying to ban journalists who engage in advocacy can get constitutionally dicey fast, Stern said. After all, many newspapers advocate for causes or candidates on their editorial pages. And in the early years of the United States, many newspapers — those that the country’s founders both championed and decried — were explicitly partisan organs of political parties.

“The journalists that the First Amendment was originally intended to protect were not objective by any means,” Stern said. “They were extremely political.”

Lawsuit threats themselves can risk chilling speech. As outspoken as Choe and Kruse have been on the issue, Washington state’s Capitol Correspondents Association has been wary of commenting.

Asked if the current situation was an improvement for press access, Cornfield remained silent for more than 20 seconds before saying he would not address that question on the record, due to ongoing concerns about potential litigation.

“You have more questions, you can keep asking,” Cornfield said. “I’m just going to give you silence.”

InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. A Report for America corps member, Daniel Walters covers democracy and extremism across the region. He can be reached at daniel@investigatewest.org.

This republished story is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit opb.org/partnerships.