Meet the ‘New Media’ Press at Trump’s White House

Natalie Winters is young, opinionated and unabashedly pro-Trump — and she is now one of the fresh “new media” faces who will occupy space in the White House Press Briefing Room as the new administration makes way for Trump-friendly outlets while diminishing the access of traditional news sources.

The latest shoe to drop on this front came Tuesday, as the White House press team blocked the Associated Press from entering the Oval Office because the outlet had not begun referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, as Trump ordered Jan. 20. AP executive editor Julie Pace called it “alarming” that the Trump White House would punish the AP for upholding the Gulf of Mexico’s title, saying it “not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.”

The Department of Defense has taken similar action, announcing that outlets like the New York Times and NBC News would be rotated out of the Pentagon to create room for outlets that are perceived as more supportive of the administration, including Breitbart News and One America News Network.

Winters, the blonde, brown-eyed, 21-year-old co-host of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” on Rumble, believes it is about time outlets like hers were given seats alongside legacy media like the Washington Post and cable channels like CNN and MSNBC. Her reason? Those institutions are “dying,” she said, at the same time Americans are increasingly turning to alternative media.

“I think it’s a reflection of the changing media landscape,” Winters told TheWrap. “The legacy media has crumbled.”

Crumbled, she said, due in large part to the American public being “rightfully pissed off” that legacy outlets didn’t cover President Joe Biden’s “mental health and cognitive decline” until after his debate with Trump last June.

Winters made that comment soon after Karoline Leavitt, President Trump’s press secretary, announced Jan. 28 that the White House would have a dedicated seat for “new media voices.”

Some veteran reporters are skeptical of Leavitt’s new media seat rollout, which appears to be a transparent attempt to secure more friendly questions and favorable coverage. Tom Jones, a senior media writer for the journalism site Poynter, said it is “all well and good” for “nontraditional” media figures to have White House access, but only if they are not being selected because they are overtly pro-Trump.

“The caveat is if the White House new spots are given to those who are merely Trump and MAGA sycophants who call themselves media just because they carry a microphone or a laptop. If that’s the case, the idea of a ‘new media’ seat is counterproductive,” Jones said. “In the end, these are press conferences, not pep rallies.”

Leavitt has said the new media seat aims to give independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers and content creators a chance to ask questions alongside reporters from more established papers and channels; more than 10,000 people applied for the seat in the four days after it was announced.

The presence of these new players serves not only as a symbol of the shift in power at the White House, but also as a sign of where the media world stands in 2025.

A recent Gallup survey found only 31% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media to accurately report the news — a new all-time low. (In 1976, soon after the Watergate Scandal, 72% of respondents trusted the media.)

Americans are instead looking for news elsewhere, like on YouTube, where Megyn Kelly’s right-leaning show and David Pakman’s left-leaning show thrived before and after the 2024 election. A sizable chunk of young Americans now turn to online influencers for their news.

Most legacy outlets, meanwhile, have been struggling.

The Washington Post’s web traffic has “cratered” in the past four years, Semafor reported, and viewers fled CNN and MSNBC after the election. (MSNBC’s ratings have rebounded post-inauguration.) The New York Times is one of the few legacy outlets not named Fox News that is performing well, with the paper enjoying one of its best quarters for digital subscriber growth in years between October and December.

Now, those media stalwarts will be battling to get questions answered alongside a new cast of White House reporters and a revolving slate of guests in the new media seat. Winters is excited about the head-to-head competition.

“It’s interesting to have these competing forces go up against each other, because for so long, we weren’t allowed to compete,” Winters said. “We were so suppressed, just from a misinformation perspective, labeling us as conspiracy theorists, taking all of our advertisers, trying to bankrupt us. But when you strip those guardrails off, and there’s — for lack of a better term — free and fair competition, we trump them every time.”

Only a handful of reporters have occupied the new media seat since the first Leavitt-led press briefing. At that briefing, the seat was split between two more established outlets, Breitbart’s Matthew Doyle and Axios co-founder Mike Allen, who was called on to ask the first question.

Since then, a theme has emerged among the new media members: They tend to be right-leaning, have shows that are not on traditional outlets and have publicly expressed support for President Trump, which tends to be reflected in the kind of questions they ask.

So far, those new media seat occupants include:

— The Ruthless Podcast: A show hosted by four young-ish men, including popular X commentator “Comfortably Smug,” that describes itself as “next generation conservative talk,” providing “a lighter analysis of the news (and fake news) of the day.” The show has 95,500 subscribers on YouTube.

Co-host John Ashbrook was called on to ask the first question during Leavitt’s second press briefing.

“You know, Karoline, in your first briefing, the media went after this administration reporting illegal immigrants they claim were not criminal,” Ashbrook said.“Question is, do you think they’re out of touch with Americans demanding action on our border crisis?”

Leavitt responded that the mainstream media “certainly is out of touch” with regards to illegal immigration. She then pointed to a recent poll from the New York Times — “which, of course, is a legacy media outlet” — that showed 87% of Americans support deporting violent illegal immigrants.

— Sage Steele: The former ESPN host now has a podcast that is on Bill Maher’s Club Random Studios network. In 2021, she said, “I respect everyone’s decision” regarding the COVID-19 vaccines, but the vaccine mandates were “sick” and “scary.” Steele said ESPN forced her to apologize for the comment, and she later sued the company for violating her First Amendment rights. The two parties settled the lawsuit in 2023.

More recently, Steele has been critical of trans women competing in women’s sports, saying it is “unfair to women.”

Steele was called on by Leavitt to ask the first question at the Feb. 5 press briefing — hours before she was on hand for Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order.

“We all know executive orders can be overturned, so I’m wondering how important it is to the president to get Congress to bring this, to pass legislation, so there are no instances like the past administration that really tried to destroy Title IX?” Steele asked.

Leavitt said the president was “setting the tone,” but that it was “incredibly important that Congress immediately acts on this priority.”

Beyond those few new media seat occupants and Winters, Mary Margaret Olohan is another reporter from the conservative media world who has emerged at the White House. Last year, the 29-year-old Olohan published “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” a book covering people who have attempted to “detransition” after regretting gender-reassignment surgery. Olohan is now reporting on the Trump White House for Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire.

Olohan, Doyle, Allen and the Ruthless Podcast hosts did not respond to TheWrap’s requests for comment. A representative for Steele said she was not available to speak due to a busy schedule.

The new media seat — coupled with Trump’s penchant for giving reporters interviews in the Oval Office and on Air Force One — reinforces that Trump is the “most transparent” president in history, Leavitt said. He may also be the most combative and hostile toward the press, with his call for CBS News to be “terminated” for its editing of a “60 Minutes” Kamala Harris interview and his call for WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson to be fired as two recent examples.

Either way, Leavitt said his administration would be reinstating more than 400 press passes that were revoked under President Biden. Those passes were pulled in 2023 when his press team put new rules in place for reporters to obtain them, among them having full-time employment with an organization and a “physical presence” in the Washington, D.C. area.

Although Winters said, “Of course, I love President Trump, and I think he’s the best president we’ve ever had,” she insisted that won’t get in the way of her asking tough questions in the briefing room.

“No, because my allegiance is not to President Trump, it’s to the American people; it’s to my audience,” Winters said. “As a reporter, obviously, I have a code of ethics, but I want to bring the truth — which sounds so cliche.”

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