The White House just barred major media outlets from a press briefing

President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, kept major media outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, out of the daily press briefing Friday, canceling it in favor of an off-camera media gaggle for handpicked media outlets and escalating the Trump administration’s fight with the press.

The White House picked which journalists could participate in the press briefing Friday. Reporters for CNN, the New York Times, Politico, BuzzFeed, and the majority of the foreign press were not among them.

The press pool, including NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News, were allowed in, as well as several smaller conservative media outlets, including the Washington Times, the One America News Network, and Breitbart, which was formerly run by White House senior strategist Steve Bannon. Time and the Associated Press boycotted the gaggle, according to reporting from CNN.

The White House Correspondents’ Association board responded to the incident, noting that they were “strongly against” how the White House conducted the media gaggle and that they would discuss the matter further with the president’s press team.

While Trump’s presidential campaign was known for banning media outlets from rallies and campaign events, this is one of the first times the media has been explicitly barred from a White House press event during Trump’s presidency.

Spicer’s decision is the latest signal that the White House is turning the media, in Bannon’s words, into the “opposition party.” Trump’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, which wrapped up a few hours before Spicer canceled the press briefing, included a tirade against anonymous sources and media outlets he called “fake.”

“Many of these groups are part of large media corporations that have their own agenda,” Trump said at CPAC. “And it’s not your agenda and it’s not the country’s agenda, it’s their own agenda. They have a professional obligation as members of the press to report honestly, but as you saw throughout the entire campaign and even now, the fake news doesn’t tell the truth.”

At a campaign-style rally in Orlando on Saturday, Trump delivered the same message he deployed repeatedly on the campaign trail — but with criticism of Hillary Clinton swapped out for insults to the media. Last Friday, he called the “FAKE NEWS media” the “enemy of the people,” listing the Times, CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC News.

Trump would rather stir up controversies about barring the media from his press briefings than talk about why the Republican agenda has stalled in Congress, or explain why he’s repeatedly promised a replacement for Obamacare that “covers everyone,” something the current Republican plans don’t do. A war with the media is a better story for Trump than a trickle of endless leaks about his campaign’s alleged interactions with Russia, or the disarray inside his White House. And a fight with the mainstream media is something Trump has in common with the traditional conservatives who cheered his CPAC remarks.

That doesn’t mean Spicer’s stunt was solely a distraction. Trump — who used to print out copies of reporters’ stories and scrawl comments on them in permanent marker — is clearly in his comfort zone as a press critic. Now he’s a press critic with much more power.