Photographers say Harris campaign has reduced their access

The Aug. 29 letter, sent to Harris campaign staffers and the vice president’s office, acknowledges that the campaign says it needed the seats for security personnel, but it reflects broader frustration from news organizations about limited access to Harris, who has had few moments of unscripted public exposure since becoming the nominee. The letter also points to the photographers association’s simmering dissatisfaction with the correspondents association, whose mission is to ensure a free and robust coverage of the presidency.

“It’s unfortunate that the still photographers are the most affected by the negotiations that have happened with the White House Correspondents’ Association and the vice president’s office,” said Doug Mills, a longtime Washington photographer who has covered presidencies and campaigns for major news outlets and served as a member of the correspondents association’s board.

“Each reporter writes a different story. Each photographer has their own eye,” Mills said. “This election is too historic to be covered by one still photographer on Harris’s plane.”

The letter, sent by the photographers association president, Jessica Koscielniak, and signed by six major news organizations — the Associated Press, AFP, the New York Times, Getty, Reuters and The Washington Post — calls on the campaign to reconsider the restrictions or otherwise make additional arrangements for the photographers. And if that’s not possible, the letter continued, it asked the correspondents association to reallocate travel seats to allow for more photographers to travel with the campaign.

“While we understand the reduction is due to security, further accommodations are required to maintain a fair and free press,” the letter says, adding that given the deluge of variously trustworthy information available, voters “rely on independent visual journalism for factual representation” of the campaigns.

In a response letter sent Wednesday night, which was first reported by Axios, the Harris campaign said the pool that traveled with the vice president on Air Force Two had always been nine, not 13. (Thirteen journalists travel with President Joe Biden on Air Force One, but the vice president’s plane is smaller. At dispute is whether the correspondents’ association should have negotiated the same number of seats on the vice president’s plane.)

Still, the campaign said it had worked in good faith with the correspondents’ association to ensure a supplemental pool always has the opportunity to travel with the Harris campaign. It also said the campaign had looked into adding additional seats to Harris’s plane and explored procuring an additional “chaser” plane to accommodate journalists, but that both solutions were not viable because of limited resources. (When reached by The Post, the campaign declined to answer questions on the record.)

But there is still sentiment that the WHCA — which has overlapping membership with the WHNPA — didn’t advocate strongly enough for photographers.

“If the roles were reversed here and the reporters were limited in their numbers the way the still photographers are, it would not be accepted,” Mills said.

Eugene Daniels, who took the helm of the WHCA this year, said the association “has and will always endeavor for more and better press access for all of our members” and that it has worked with the vice president’s team to expand the nine-seat allotment on the plane.

“We’ve also asked the Harris staff about a possible secondary plane and even changing the configuration of Air Force Two to allow for the three still photographers to be on the plane for every trip. All of those have been explored by the VP’s team. Our aim is for every component of the press corps to be represented to the greatest extent, so that we can provide the broadest possible coverage for the American people,” Daniels said. “That advocacy will continue.”

This isn’t the first time news photographers have bumped up against the access restrictions to the vice president. In July, the six news organizations that signed the recent letter considered boycotting photo coverage of Harris’s Oval Office meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protest the vice president’s office’s decision to restrict photo coverage of the event. In the end, the photographers and the WHCA reached a compromise with the vice president’s office on the number of photographers allowed to cover the meeting and a boycott was avoided.

But frustrations remain.

“News photographers were just kind of blindsided by this whole decision and this new policy moving forward,” said a longtime Washington photojournalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on behalf of their news organization, which is one of the six newsrooms that signed the letter.

A boycott, the photographer said, is a last resort.

“You want to make sure that you advocate for your part of the journalistic profession as strongly as you can, but if you boycotted, you’re going from some coverage to no coverage. And the question is, at that point, are you fulfilling your journalistic responsibilities,” the photographer said. “We still need pictures right of the vice president campaigning for the presidency.”