NEW YORK -- It isn't usually big news for a news organization to attend a speech given by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. But Wednesday marked the first time this election cycle that Donald Trump's campaign officially granted BuzzFeed News access to cover one of his events.
The Trump campaign has denied press credentials to numerous outlets in response to what it considers unfair coverage, including The Huffington Post, Politico, The Daily Beast, Univision, Fusion, The Des Moines Register, The Union Leader, Mother Jones, National Review and most recently The Washington Post. Journalists receiving credentials at times have also faced restrictions on their ability to report inside events.
BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins wrote Wednesday that he, along with journalists from outlets such as Slate, Gawker and Rolling Stone, was initially stopped by security at the Trump Soho hotel prior to the candidate's speech aimed squarely at presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. After security tried escorting out the reporters, Coppins described how campaign press secretary Hope Hicks intervened and offered to find space for the journalists. The group entered the event soon after.
Hicks declined to comment.
The decision to allow BuzzFeed inside, a move coming days after the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, an operative renowned for his hostile dealings with journalists, could be seen as a thaw in the relationship between the Trump campaign and the press.
But the media blacklist doesn't appear to have been universally relaxed. The Washington Post's Lois Romano and Jose DelReal were not allowed inside the same event, Romano tweeted Wednesday.
The Washington Post's Paul Farhi wrote Monday that the campaign's restrictions on supposedly banned outlets "are often arbitrarily enforced and vaguely defined." Though Trump announced on Facebook that the Post would be banned from receiving press credentials over a specific headline, the campaign hasn't made similar public pronouncements when other outlets, like BuzzFeed, found themselves cut off.
Coppins wrote a critical profile of Trump in 2014 and predicted, like many politics watchers, that the reality TV star would never actually run for president. But the Trump campaign hasn't explicitly given a reason why BuzzFeed was put on the blacklist throughout the 2016 cycle -- a question the site's Washington bureau chief, John Stanton, unsuccessfully tried getting answered in a video posted Tuesday.
Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.
