President Donald Trump isn't shy about voicing his dislike for the media, but he took his disdain a step further Friday morning by holding a restricted press briefing.
The U.S. president excluded CNN and the New York Times as well as the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed and Politico for an off-camera briefing.
However, banned media outlets don't necessarily get their "hard passes" revoked. To get a press pass to the briefing room, reporters go through a process of approval.
First, the reporter needs to be approved by the Standing Committee of Correspondents, an association of reporters which approve press passes for Congress, according to Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy.
Reporters must also verify the credibility of the outlet for which they work and go through a Secret Service background check. Once a reporter is granted a pass, they can renew it every year without having to go through the approval process, Keating said.
According to Keating, it's unheard of for a journalist to be suspended or barred over the quality of their reporting or behavior. The White House rarely pulls passes unless there's a security threat or an unusual circumstance.
George Condon, a longtime White House reporter and former President of the White House Correspondent's Association said he knows of "no instance of any newspaper having its [White House] credentials pulled" since the correspondents' association was founded in 1914, according to Smithsonian.com.
But just because the White House historically hasn't made a habit of revoking hard press passes, it doesn't mean presidents and their administration haven't banned media outlets from events and press briefings.
Like Mr. Trump, President Richard Nixon started a notorious war with the media. Nixon banned the Washington Post from the White House after the newspaper broke the Watergate scandal.
As heard in an audio recording, Nixon went as far as to threaten to fire his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, if he ever let a Post reporter into a briefing, according to the Smithsonian.
While Nixon didn't formally pull the Post's press credentials, Post reporters were not allowed at any White House social events.
In 2008, President Barack Obama booted three reporters from conservative newspapers off his campaign plane.
The campaign claimed there were only a limited number of seats on the plane for reporters, who would follow the then-candidate on the last four days of his presidential campaign.
Obama's camp didn't allow The Washington Times, the New York Post or the Dallas Morning News on the plane but allowed non-political media outlets such as Glamour and Ebony magazines to stay.
The three barred media outlets called foul play, but Obama's campaign responded by saying they allowed other media outlets, such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal to stay, even though they'd been critical of Obama.
Friday's media ban was the first during Trump's official presidency. Given his current beef with the media, it likely won't be the last ban.
