The Statehouse Gatekeepers: How Elite Media Handed Government the Keys to Press Access
When journalism's old guard would rather surrender credentialing than share the capitol press room, everyone loses
In statehouses across America, a quiet war is being waged over who gets to hold government accountable. The battleground isn't partisan politics—it's press credentials.
In Washington state, this spring 2025, we witnessed the latest casualty: A credentialed journalist was turned away from a routine legislative briefing by a government official who declared, "You're not a real reporter."
How did we get here? Follow the thread, and it leads straight to journalism's elite gatekeepers who would rather hand control to politicians than share access with new voices.
The Abdication That Changed Everything
The wheels came off the wagon earlier this year in Washington when Jerry Cornfield, head of Washington's Capitol Correspondents Association, made an unprecedented decision.
Rather than grant credentials to reporters the organization must not have wanted to admit or defend the association's credentialing practices against legal challenges, he abdicated the organization's decades-old responsibility and handed it back to the government.
This wasn't just bureaucratic reshuffling. Cornfield, attached to the Arabella Advisors-funded States Newsroom project, chose to let politicians control press access rather than allow independent journalists into the club.
The Washington State Senate eagerly seized this power, passing Resolution 8638 that restricts media access to legislative wings unless “specifically requested by a senator or senate staff.”
In one voice vote, five decades of press independence vanished. Poof.
The Elite Media's Dirty Secret
There’s a cord running through journalism that spools directly up to the elites—a long-standing cabal of journalists and news organizations that work to keep competitors away from the news.
They preserve their direct access by currying favor with those in positions of power, creating a cozy relationship that serves neither truth nor the public interest.
You may think that all scoops come from dogged, shoe-leather reporting. Far from it, most of the big ones are portioned out to the reporters who play the game.
This gatekeeping is anti- lowercase-d-democratic at its core. During the COVID-19 era, it reached its peak with cries of “misinformation” and “disinformation” used as weapons to silence alternative voices. But the practice predates the pandemic and continues today in state capitols where the “club” decides who’s legitimate - therefore who’s allowed to keep you informed on government activities.
The Center Square - the national newswire I founded and where I serve as publisher - witnessed this system in action when our Washington statehouse reporter, Carleen Johnson, observed a seasoned journalist with valid credentials being denied access to a Senate Democrat press briefing. Despite holding an official pass issued that morning, the reporter was told they couldn’t enter “the wings” where briefings occur.
When pressed, Senate Democrats’ communications director Aaron Wasser revealed his new criteria: “You’re not a real reporter.”
The b*!#sh^t that reporters go through to have the privilege of listening to the b*!#sh^t on legislative floors is an inherent part of daily journalism that the public rarely sees. But it’s there, and it stinks.
Our Fight for Access—And Yours
Sadly, this is just the latest example, but it’s not new. Since our founding in 2019, The Center Square has fought these battles, state after state.
We’ve challenged the gatekeepers in Illinois for years before they relented. And we had to fight through the old guard of the local correspondents association for that, as well.
We’ve demanded access in Pennsylvania, where another Arabella-funded reporter tried to hold out our reporter through specific rules proposing additional burdens on nonprofit media brands. (An attempt that would have hurt a growing number of media companies - more on that in a later post…)
Today, The Center Square is credentialed at every state capitol where we’ve applied for access.
We’re hard-carded media at the White House and regularly serve in the presidential press pool, which means that our reporting is made available to all news-media when the president speaks from inside the oval office or in smaller venues where access is limited by physical space.
I don’t tell you these accomplishments lightly. They are ones for which I am very proud. I don’t like bullies. It took years, a stiff upper lip, and a hell of a newsroom to cut through some of the openly-bias, intentionally-bureaucratic hurdles we faced to be able to report our credentialing success rate.
We didn’t achieve this by asking permission from journalism’s old guard. We did it by insisting that credentialing be based on objective standards, not subjective judgments about who’s “real” enough.
The Center Square publishes, on average, 300 stories per week from statehouses and across the country, every week. We have more than 1,250 outlet partners nationwide that rely on this work every weekday. I think that makes us, by any measure, real. (And if you think there are harsher critics of your reporting than a thousand news editors and publishers each serving unique audiences, I welcome your opinions - ckrug@thecentersquare.com.)
Yet, the fight goes on.
In Washington, the kerfuffle over credentials actually led to the state senate eliminating free movement to the corners of the senate floor (where a reporter could actually have a one-on-one with an elected official), and the Washington house has no credentialing policy whatsoever.
Yeah, well, that aggression won’t stand, man. Washington’s legislature needs to get its act together ahead of the next special session or the start of the 2026 legislative year to ensure voters know what is happening.
Why Statehouse Access Matters
The timing of Washington’s press crackdown reveals why this matters. As The Center Square reported, this restriction coincides with Governor Bob Ferguson signing the largest tax increase in state history—$9 billion in new taxes hitting families and businesses already struggling with affordability. Remember, there are fewer than 8 million people who live in the state of Washington.
State legislatures control $3.5 trillion in annual spending across the United States. They decide your property taxes, business regulations, education funding (and education freedoms), and criminal justice policies. Yet statehouse press corps across the nation are shrinking, creating an accountability vacuum. We need more people with pens, pads, cameras, and microphones haunting our statehouses, not fewer.
Into this vacuum step organizations like ours, The Center Square, committed to government-accountability journalism at the state level. Is it any wonder the old guard and their political allies want to keep us out?
The Dangerous Precedent
Amidst this mess in the 2025 session, an executive at the state’s Newspaper Publishers Association told The Center Square: “Our media has to have access, and we’re seeing a decrease in access.” But, again, this isn’t just about access—it’s about who decides that access.
When journalists like Cornfield hand credentialing power to government, they betray the fundamental adversarial relationship between press and power. When elite media organizations gate-keep to protect their privileged position, they abandon their duty to the public.
Sen. Jeff Wilson warned during the resolution debate that they were moving to “control who gets to talk to when, who, and how.” His Republican colleague, Sen. John Braun, noted there had been “no instance of misbehavior” by press—the restrictions were simply because leadership was “sensitive to media that aren’t 100% on their side.”
The Path Forward
News media has changed. It no longer is controlled by the elites. If anything, the 2024 presidential election showed how little influence that Big Media (network newscasts, cable news, The New York Times, Washington Post, et al) had with regular Americans in the middle. Yet in state capitols, the old guard clings desperately to their gatekeeping power.
The solution isn’t complicated: Credentialing must be based on objective, transparent standards that any legitimate news organization can meet. Not friendship networks. Not political comfort levels. Not whether someone graduated from the right journalism school or works for the right outlet.
Every time gatekeepers—whether journalists or politicians—pick winners and losers in the press room, democracy suffers. The public loses access to diverse viewpoints. Accountability withers. The powerful protect themselves from scrutiny.
The Center Square will continue fighting for access in every statehouse, not just for ourselves but for the principle that journalism belongs to everyone willing to do the hard work of holding government accountable.
Because when elite journalists would rather surrender to government control than share the press room, someone needs to stand up for the First Amendment. Even if it means being told we’re not “real” reporters by those who’ve forgotten what real journalism looks like.
The idea of journalistic competitors determining who will and won’t be credentialed is a petri dish for fomenting corruption.
Then again, petri dishes are typically transparent, which these selection processes are not.
The battle for statehouse press access is the battle for government accountability. Which side are you on?
Witnessing credentialing games in your state? Email me at ckrug@thecentersquare.com