Today, major news outlets were blacklisted from Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s press gaggle. But the pro-Trump press was allowed in. Yet Fox News’ Chief White House Correspondent, John Roberts, only wanted to report what Spicer said about the exclusion. Neither Roberts nor anchor Melissa Francis revealed which press got in and which got shut out.

Media Matters has the backstory:

Hours after President Donald Trump denounced critical journalists as “the enemy of the people” before a cheering crowd of supporters, major news outlets were blacklisted from a White House press gaggle while the administration’s sycophants were ushered in.

“CNN was not permitted to attend, along with the New York Times, Politico, Buzzfeed and much of the foreign press that regularly attends White House briefings,” CNN reported. Instead, White House press secretary Sean Spicer found room for the pro-Trump outlets Breitbart.com, The Washington Times, and One America News Network.

The restrictions mark the return of the Trump campaign’s strategy of revoking reporters’ press credentials and denying them access to events following unfavorable coverage of the now-president.

On America’s News HQ today, Roberts repeatedly dodged Francis’ questions about the press exclusions. “Some networks being excluded today from the gaggle. Others were invited but declined,” Francis said in her introduction. “It’s all anybody’s talking about.”

Well, it wasn’t what Roberts was talking about. Francis said to him, “There’s conflicting stuff floating around online. You’re actually there. Tell us what’s going on.”

Roberts cagily replied, “What’s the conflicting stuff and I’ll tell you what really happened.”

“Who’s allowed to be in there and are certain news operations being kept on the sidelines intentionally?” Francis asked.

Roberts clearly did not want to say. In fact, he never even revealed who got blocked. He sounded more like a walking Trump press release than a reporter:

ROBERTS: Well, I could tell you that they did not have an on-camera briefing today, in the Brady Briefing Room, as they normally do, which typically would see upwards of 70, maybe even 80 people in there, kind of jammed to the rafters.

The president had a big speech at CPAC today so they decided that they were going to let his speech speak for itself and Sean Spicer wasn’t going to have a traditional briefing. So he invited a number of news organizations up to his office to have what’s called an “off-camera gaggle.” It’s on the record but off camera so we recorded it and there were, oh, probably 20 news organizations that were invited to that and then there were a hundreds of other news organizations that were not invited to that.

Sean Spicer was asked about it after one network started running a headline that it was excluded from this gaggle. Spicer said that they had a number of requests, there were only so many requests that they could accommodate because there was only so much room. As to their actual motivation – uh, whether it was just a room thing or maybe it was something else, I can’t say at this point because Spicer did not give us that information. I mean, I could speculate but that would only be speculation on my part.

Or you could do some, you know, digging? Surely Roberts has got lots of contacts in the Trump administration and with other reporters.

However, Francis was satisfied with Roberts’ “I’ll only report what Spicer tells me” answer. She chirped, “There you go. I’m glad we have someone there who’s seeing what’s going on and can tell us first hand because that’s what matters these days.”

By the way, to his credit, Bret Baier tweeted that the gaggle should be open to all credentialed organizations:

Some at CNN & NYT stood w/FOX News when the Obama admin attacked us & tried 2 exclude us-a WH gaggle should be open to all credentialed orgs https://t.co/8Vjcs0KCPR

— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) February 24, 2017

Watch Roberts’ weasely report below, from the January 24, 2017 America’s News HQ.