Now the dictator is deciding who can report on his dictatorship.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced the White House would determine which media outlets would cover the president in smaller spaces such as the Oval Office.

The White House Correspondents’ Association has traditionally coordinated the rotation of the presidential press pool. Reuters, an international wire service, has participated in the pool for decades.

This is all wrong. Administrations should not be deciding who can cover them, for reasons that are blindingly obvious.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that while traditional media organizations would still be permitted to cover Trump on a day-to-day basis, the administration plans to change who participates in smaller spaces. The pool system, administered by the WHCA, allowed select television, radio, wire, print and photojournalists to cover events and share their reporting with the broader media.

It should not be the administration’s call who participates in smaller spaces. The administration should not have the power to manipulate the reporting on itself.

The three wire services that have traditionally served as permanent members of the White House pool, the AP, Bloomberg and Reuters, on Wednesday released a statement, opens new tab in response to the new policy.

The services “have long worked to ensure that accurate, fair and timely information about the presidency is communicated to a broad audience of all political persuasions, both in the United States and globally. Much of the White House coverage people see in their local news outlets, wherever they are in the world, comes from the wires,” the statement from the three organizations said.

“It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press.”

Independent and free – not chosen and managed by the people they’re reporting on.

Huff Post called the White House decision a violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of the press…On Tuesday, the WHCA also issued a statement protesting the new White House policy.

The move follows the Trump administration’s decision to bar the Associated Press from being in the pool because it has declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the name Trump has assigned the body of water, or update its widely followed stylebook to reflect such a change.

They’re moving fast and breaking the tools we need to keep track of them.