“The New Yorker” staff writer Susan Glasser expressed frustration with the new generation of media reporters in the White House press corps during an appearance on MSNBC Friday afternoon.

MSNBC HOST: Why should we be paying attention, Susan, to what’s happening with the White House press corps? SUSAN GLASSER, THE NEW YORKER: Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, we can see that Donald Trump is increasingly operating as if he feels no constraints whatsoever. We know he’s probably the most media-focused president we’ve ever had, which is saying a lot because all presidents are focused to a certain extent on how they’re portrayed by the public. Donald Trump is somebody who essentially lives, breathes, and consumes media not in that order. And I think that the moves that his White House has taken in his second term are very important and very notable. I think that, you know, in hindsight, a key moment that wasn’t really understood or treated as such was the moment the White House decided for the first time in history to take control of the independent press pool and decide who gets access to the president, who gets to ask questions of the president. They threw the Associated Press out of the White House press pool back in the winter of this year because the Associated Press refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And at that moment in time, you know, other White House reporters had a choice. Their institutions had a choice. They could have linked arms, as the Pentagon press corps has done recently and said, no, this is unacceptable. It’s not up to the president to decide who asks him questions. It’s, you know, got to be up to the media itself. They didn’t do that. And I think what we’re seeing is what I call essentially the Kremlinization of the White House press pool. And, you know, putting around him more and more sycophants, more and more people are going to tell him, sir, how great are you, sir? What a good job are you doing, sir? And of course, these aren’t questions. These are propaganda inquiries that are designed to produce results that the White House wants and likes. That’s not reporting. MSNBC: So you have said that the questions from the press may be one of the things that are still tethering this administration to reality. Explain that. GLASSER: I mean, imagine when they’re only questions like, sir, how great are you? And so that’s the argument, by the way, for many news organizations, why they remained in the pool, even though they were concerned about what had been done to the Associated Press. And I understand that argument on one hand, because it’s better that Trump should have some reality-based questions rather than none. That seems to be the choice that was made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which was to say I’m going to have no independent reporters ever getting a chance to get near me, and now basically the entire Pentagon press corps has turned in its press passes rather than follow those rules. But again, Donald Trump is a man who creates reality, but also who is extremely sensitive to his portrayal, especially on television, but not exclusively on television. And so if he’s creating an alternate reality, it’s not just for his followers, but I would say it’s for himself as well.

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