Fringe media figures are increasingly present at the White House and throughout the new administration, even as President Trump and other senior officials keep established news outlets at bay.
The Trump administration has barred The Associated Press from significant events at the White House, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and aboard Air Force One because it will not submit to his demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
"We're going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it's the Gulf of America," Trump said on Tuesday. The next day, AP Executive Editor Julie Pace met with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to address the issue. But the news service says it will not compromise its independent editorial standards, including on the Gulf.
By contrast, Lara Logan — barred from Fox News and the right-wing network Newsmax for promoting extremist views — shocked some participants by joining a formal State Department listening session about international aid last Friday. While the event was intended for people who worked or had worked at the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development or the nonprofits and companies who work with them on contract, it was open to the public. More than 1,000 people — more than expected — logged on.
The event was convened by Peter Marocco, the State Department's director for foreign assistance who is also overseeing USAID's operations. (The State Department did not reply to requests for comment.)
Logan, who has said she has known Marocco for nearly two decades, was among 30 people called upon by the event moderator, a faculty member at Florida International University. She spoke for about five minutes — longer than other participants, according to five people who attended the event. (Logan did not respond to a request for comment sent through an associate.)
They say Logan charged that foreign aid programs were rife with corruption and demanded accountability. According to three attendees, Logan repeatedly invoked the idea that crimes had been committed and called for imprisonment of those involved. Logan said in Texas, where she lives, the middle class had been hollowed out, and money used for foreign aid instead should go to support those families.
(The participants spoke on condition they not be named because they feared professional repercussions at a time of widespread layoffs of federal employees and contractors.)
On screen, the attendees say, Logan spoke on an account bearing the name Luke Coffee; Coffee is the Texas-based co-host and producer of her latest video production. Logan called Coffee "an extraordinary man — the best you'll ever meet" in a tweet last month.
Coffee was found guilty of six felony offenses related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including assaulting police officers; Coffee had not yet been sentenced when the U.S. Justice Department moved to dismiss his case following Trump's order to give clemency to all Jan. 6 defendants.
Marocco is from Dallas. He and his wife were identified by online sleuths, who call themselves the Sedition Hunters, as having entered the U.S. Capitol during the siege; in comments to D magazine, Marocco called the allegation "petty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks," though he did not deny it.
Led by Marocco and Trump advisor Elon Musk, the administration has frozen nearly all international aid as part of what they characterize as a campaign to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Some staffers at USAID —and some lawmakers — say they've thrown lifesaving programs into chaos; some contractors on the call advocated for the programs they say are vital.
Logan was a highly decorated foreign correspondent at CBS News until her embrace of a fabulist's claims about Benghazi imploded her career at 60 Minutes. She later hosted her own shows on Fox's streaming service, Fox Nation.
Fox bounced her after she compared former presidential chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci to the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, who performed sadistic experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Newsmax blocked her over comments in which she said a cabal of world leaders push open borders "while they dine on the blood of children."
New faces in the White House briefing room
Over at the White House, too, fringe media figures are taking on increased prominence.
At a formal press conference with India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, Trump called on a reporter for the Gateway Pundit. The site has a history of promoting groundless conspiracy theories. It filed for bankruptcy after facing defamation suits over its false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential race. (A federal judge rejected the site's bankruptcy petition, finding the company had not acted in good faith.)
The Gateway Pundit reporter, Jordan Conradson, asked Modi how much more confident he was with Trump leading the U.S than former President Joe Biden, given what Conradson called "Biden's incompetence and weakness over the last four years." In his account of the event, Conradson wrote, "Biden could never have inspired such confidence in a foreign leader or negotiated such an incredible partnership to help the U.S. prosper."
There have been unconventional correspondents at the White House over the years — from the right-wing Baltimore talk-radio host Lester Kinsolving, to a former escort turned political blogger during George W. Bush's administration, to a reporter for the India Globe who has served as a useful foil for decades when White House officials wanted to sidestep tough questions from American journalists.
This White House, however, is welcoming sympathetic media figures and influencers whom they credit, in part, for Trump's win. They have amplified memes, conspiracies and false claims during — and since — the presidential campaign.
Since saying she was opening a new seat in the briefing room for "new media," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt received thousands of applications.
Among the reporters now present at press briefings are the co-host of Steve Bannon's podcast "The War Room" and a reporter from Lindell TV. That's the video news outlet created by MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell, a pro-Trump booster of thoroughly discredited claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Once-fringe media figures crop up across Washington
The new administration, more broadly, is welcoming media figures once relegated to the fringes.
Far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec posted last week that he had traveled with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Kyiv; the Washington Post reported that Posobiec initially had been invited to travel with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
And Julie Kelly, a right-wing writer prominent on social media for her MAGA posts, announced last week that she had visited the U.S. Justice Department as an "invited guest." Kelly said in a note to NPR that she's "covered DOJ for years" and declined to "disclose the nature of my visit."
Kelly fiercely advocated for blanket pardons for all those charged with crimes in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol shortly before Trump did so, referring to police officers injured in the attack as "crisis actors." She has also compared the FBI to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret police, and called for the bureau to be defunded.
Mainstream media pushed aside — or shut out
Evidence of Trump's hostility to the mainstream media can be found throughout his administration.
The State Department has joined a growing list of federal departments and agencies slashing subscriptions to media outlets, including the New York Times, the Economist, Bloomberg News, Politico, the AP and Reuters.
Under Hegseth, a former star at Fox, the Pentagon has dislodged journalists for CNN, NBC, NPR, Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Hill, and the military site The War Zone from their work stations and brought in seven conservative and far-right sites to replace them. A liberal site, HuffPost, was also offered space, though its spokesperson says it had not asked for it. Journalists for the ousted news outlets still have the press passes that let them report from inside the Pentagon.
And then there's the White House's refusal to budge on punishing the AP. For decades, the AP has invariably been part of pools designed to let a small group of journalists share accounts of events with other outlets. The news agency serves thousands of news outlets and claims billions of readers worldwide.
The AP's Stylebook, a language guide for the outlet's own journalists as well as those at other news organizations, recommends that writers continue to call the body of water between Mexico and Florida the Gulf of Mexico, while acknowledging Trump's desired shift in language. The president has directed the federal government to rename it the Gulf of America. Several mapmakers, including Apple and Google, have followed suit. The Stylebook notes that the AP serves a global audience and clients, and that Mexico, which borders the Gulf, has not changed its language.
"The Associated Press, as you know, has been very, very wrong on the election, on Trump, and the treatment of Trump, and other things having to do with Trump and Republicans and conservatives," Trump said at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. "They're doing us no favors. And I guess I'm not doing them any favors."
The news service rejects his characterization. "This is about the government telling the public and press what words to use and retaliating if they do not follow government orders," said Lauren Easton, a spokesperson for the Associated Press. "The Associated Press has provided critical and independent coverage of the White House for over 100 years."
The White House Correspondents Association sent a private letter of protest to Wiles, as first reported by Oliver Darcy's newsletter Status.
According to two White House reporters who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for their outlets, efforts to stage a walkout or other acts of solidarity with the AP have been stymied by the presence of new right-wing members of the White House press corps. If mainstream media were to leave, they said, the outlets that are outright supportive of Trump are poised to fill the gap.
NPR's Matteen Mokalla contributed to this story.
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