Some time around late April, the White House launched WHWire (a stylized form of “White House Wire”) and its daily news supplement, Wire Daily. I haven’t found the exact date it was formed, but the first independent news outlet to report on it that I could find was on April 30, 2025, so I’m going to assume it was around then. I can find no official announcement from the White House of its release. Additionally, the @whwire Twitter/X account is not officially affiliated with the website.
Almost immediately upon its release, it was compared to conservative media aggregator Drudge Report, which both links to external media sites and does original reporting. Drudge Report creator Matt Drudge has threatened a lawsuit against WHWire for intellectual property theft; I can find no further updates on this case, or whether or not this suit was filed. Some independent commentators have also noted that its Wire Daily newsletter has a very similar name to conservative media outlet the Daily Wire; I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but whenever I tried to research for information on the Wire Daily, I just got results for the Daily Wire, so I would say there is some practical confusion here.
Like the Drudge Report, WHWire is primarily a conservative news aggregator, though they also do their own reporting. I actually sampled 56 articles aggregated from external sources (41 from the front page of the WHWire, 15 from newsletters and phone notifications, which I now regret signing up for). Using the Ad Fontes media bias chart for each source, the average bias rating was about a 12.4 (on a scale of -42 to 42, with -42 being “hyper-partisan left”, 0 being “unbiased”, and 42 being “hyper-partisan right”), which roughly correlates to “strong right”. Using the same source, the average reliability rating was about a 32.8 (on a scale of 0 to 64, with 0 being least reliable and 64 being high level of reliability and in-depth analysis), which roughly correlates to “opinion or wide variation in reliability”. This is about as accurate as JusttheNews, and about as partisan as The Post Millenial. I’ll also note that Fox Business was the only outlet that WHWire aggregated from that was in Ad Fontes’ “green box”, a window of sources that represents both reliable and relatively low-bias sources; it represented two out of the 50 articles I analyzed. The least reliable and most biased sources were the Charlie Kirk Show and Amac Newsline, each of which had one aggregated article. I couldn’t find an independent reliability rating for any of the original reporting, so this will have to do for a bias rating. Obviously, a sample size of 50 probably isn’t sufficient for broad, sweeping analysis, but it is at least a good snapshot of the current situation.
Also, I’ll just say it: the website has extremely low usability. It has a distracting, in-your-face design likely meant to make it more visually interesting to increase clickbait potential, but it makes it hard to actually read what’s on there. I also have not actually figured out how to view old articles on it (and I’ve been working on this for about a week and a half at the time of submission). It doesn’t regularly update, either, which means it doesn’t work well as a news aggregator.
Now, I’m not inherently opposed to the idea that the government might release “news articles” on what they’ve been doing recently. I think there can be value in having these as publicly accessible reports, similar to official press statements but with more depth. I don’t support state media as the primary method of reporting. But, taken in context with independent sources, I think there can be benefit to it.
However, this appears to be part of a larger push to delegitimize outlets critical of the president. As I said, this was released in late April (right near the end of the month). On May 1, Donald Trump directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to cut funding to public outlets the National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) due to “biased and partisan news coverage” (Executive Order (EO) 14290, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media”). The Ad Fontes report I referenced earlier gave both NPR and PBS higher accuracy ratings and lower bias ratings than Fox Business, the most accurate and least biased aggregated source I found. Even if you accept that these sources are too biased for federal funding (which is a matter of personal opinion), all sources receiving additional traffic due to a federally funded website are more biased than that.
I’ll also note EO 14290 states “government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence”, which is, strictly speaking, true. However, it is worth remembering that, at the same time that this is issued, the White House is actively publishing their own news articles through a federally funded and operated outlet. This EO might actually have some validity to it (again, there may be legitimate reasons to require federally funded outlets to adhere to certain standards of impartiality and accuracy, and there are concerns about state-funded media), but it only targets outlet Trump has a documented history of disagreeing with. It ignores the outlets being run by his own office.
During the transition period before inauguration, Trump sued pollster Ann Seltzer for an unfavorable poll prediction. ABC and CBS also settled defamation cases most legal experts agree they would’ve won in court. Early in the administration, the AP was removed from White House briefing rooms for refusing to use his preferred terminology. Since this was announced, comedians Steven Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel were pulled from air for critical comments in order to protect their stations’ broadcasting licenses. Trump has sued the New York Times for unfavorable news coverage, exemplified by their endorsement of Kamala Harris. And he has successfully cut federal funding to public outlets.
Trump and his administration are simultaneously threatening and suing outlets that speak against him, while promoting a state-owned outlet that simultaneously produces their own media and promotes outlets that are supportive of him. That combines to create an outlet hostile to independent journalism. This is important to watch moving forward, in case this becomes the primary method of government communication and reporting. This is the type of outlet that could form the basis of not just state-owned media, but state-controlled media, especially given the pressure the government is already putting on independent outlets.