White House Convenes Task Force to Investigate Mysterious Disappearance of Press Coverage
The commission, chaired by the officials who confiscated the credentials, will meet behind closed doors with no reporters present to observe its findings.
The newly formed Press Visibility Working Group held its first meeting Thursday afternoon in a wing of the White House that, for reasons still under review, no camera crew was permitted to enter.
According to an internal memo, the task force's mandate is to determine "through rigorous, closed-door deliberation" why television coverage of the President has declined so sharply in recent weeks. The memo does not mention that several of the task force's members personally instructed Secret Service agents to seize the hard passes of the journalists assigned to cover such events.
"We take this lack of coverage extremely seriously," said a spokesperson who then asked that the statement not be filmed, photographed, or otherwise documented in any retrievable format. The spokesperson added that a preliminary report would be released "as soon as someone figures out how to get it on television."
The task force's first recommendation, circulated only among its own members, was to schedule a second, larger meeting to further study the matter, with attendance restricted to those already inside the building.