In the past, White House press secretaries tended to prioritize the reporters sitting in the first two rows.
They would give the first question to The Associated Press (after decades of starting with Helen Thomas, long known as the dean of the White House press corps). Then it was on to the major networks, newspapers and other wire services.
Mr. Spicer has bypassed this convention.
As he goes around the room, Mr. Spicer typically calls on media organizations outside of the mainstream before getting to more traditional news outlets.
.. The first briefing question of Mr. Spicer’s tenure went to a New York Post reporter who wrote a book that was critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton. LifeZette, a website founded by the radio host Laura Ingraham, was first in the second briefing.
Reporters from conservative outlets like Breitbart, One America News Network and Newsmax are regularly tapped for questions.
..Raghubir Goyal, who says he is affiliated with a news organization called India Globe and whose tendency to veer off topic has been used by previous secretaries to defuse tense moments, has been called on twice.
Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles
By then, the president, for whom chains of command and policy minutiae rarely meant much, was demanding that Mr. Priebus begin to put in effect a much more conventional White House protocol that had been taken for granted in previous administrations: From now on, Mr. Trump would be looped in on the drafting of executive orders much earlier in the process.
Another change will be a new set of checks on the previously unfettered power enjoyed by Mr. Bannon and the White House policy director, Stephen Miller, who oversees the implementation of the orders and who received the brunt of the internal and public criticism for the rollout of the travel ban.
Mr. Priebus has told Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon that the administration needs to rethink its policy and communications operation in the wake of embarrassing revelations that key details of the orders were withheld from agencies, White House staff and Republican congressional leaders like Speaker Paul D. Ryan.
Mr. Priebus has also created a 10-point checklist for the release of any new initiatives that includes signoff from the communications department and the White House staff secretary, Robert Porter, according to several aides familiar with the process.
But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.
Trump’s call for election-fraud probe fraught with peril
Former Justice Department lawyers and prominent Democrats are warning the president against a blatantly political exercise.
.. Such an effort would also conjure up memories of an anti-voter-fraud drive launched under President George W. Bush a decade ago. That initiative — and the firing of some U.S. attorneys who were reluctant to go along with it — led to a major political imbroglio that prompted the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
.. Perhaps due to those sensitivities, White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested Wednesday that Trump is more likely to pursue a commission that would examine the sources and scope of potential fraud rather than trying to find cases to prosecute. Spicer described the planned inquiry not as an investigation, but a more genteel-sounding “study.”
.. “Part of the reason we need to do a study is … there’s a lot of people that are dead that are on rolls, that are voting in two places or that are on the rolls in two different states, sometimes in three different states,” Spicer said
.. Even a high-profile commission would be something of a high-wire act, since Democrats will insist that controversial voter ID laws also be part of any such review if they take part.
.. “The thing I want him to do, I want him to investigate, are all of the people who don’t get the chance to vote, who have been denied the right to vote,” Cummings said.
.. “The Obama administration had the tools to fight voter fraud but let them gather dust. Because of that neglect of their duties, aliens got on the rolls, people voted multiple times and lawlessness took hold of our elections.”
How Sean Spicer Wins by Losing
In a conventional administration, Spicer would have been shredded by now and recycled to the American Beverage Association to serve as its spokesman.
.. It’s the job of every presidential press secretary to finesse the misstatements and gaffes made by the boss. But no podium-pounder in recent memory has been asked to do what Spicer has been asked to do—apply a gloss to baseless conspiracy theories that have already been debunked—and retail it to reporters.
.. Reporters are onto the Spicer gambit already, none more so than NPR’s Mara Liasson. On Monday, she slyly asked him to name the unemployment rate, a frequent subject of Trump’s trutherism. On Tuesday, she again toyed with Spicer when she asked in a slightly exaggerated manner whether Trump’s allegation of massive voter fraud by 3 million to 5 million people doesn’t necessitate an investigation. “Maybe we will,” Spicer said, before drifting off into a free-associationland comment
.. How did the Generals win by losing? For one thing, nobody expected them to win. Their defeat was integral to the greater game plan, part of their service to a higher power, specifically the Globetrotters.
.. Nobody who understands Trump expects Spicer to beat the press in the briefing room as he defends his boss’ latest nutbag idea, only to keep the ball in plausible play until time is called and the cameras dim. Like the Generals, Spicer must put up a fight that’s good enough to deflect attention from the president