President Trump announced Friday that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were banned from the White House, effective immediately.
By Saturday morning, the ban was real. Reporters from all three organizations were turned away from the White House grounds. Press passes were disabled or confiscated, Reuters reported. By Monday morning, the media companies were filing lawsuits.
The First Amendment establishes a floor. A president who professes devotion to free speech should aim higher.
The reaction from plenty of people on the right was predictable: Good! About time! A friend of mine reposted Trump’s announcement on Facebook with three words: “Late but welcome.”
I understand the sentiment. I don’t share it.
The institutional press has spent years torching its own credibility. CNN can be grossly unfair. Politico can be tendentious. And MS NOW is simply unwatchable. Reporters make mistakes, protect narratives, follow ideological fashions, and regularly publish garbage. Trump is perfectly entitled to say so.
But none of that answers the question: What should government do about it?
The First Amendment issue here is more complicated than the knee-jerk reactions suggest. Reporters possess no free-floating constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, fly on Air Force One, join the presidential press pool, or demand an interview with the president.
The courts have never said otherwise.
In fact, the White House won an important round last year when the Associated Press sued after being excluded over its refusal to adopt “Gulf of America.” In a June order, two D.C. Circuit judges concluded that restricted presidential spaces such as the Oval Office, Air Force One, and Mar-a-Lago are not First Amendment forums. The White House therefore retains considerable discretion over which journalists get in — even, the judges said, on the basis of viewpoint.
Brian Stelter can hyperventilate all he likes. CNN does not own a chair in the Oval Office.
But the same ruling reaffirmed an older rule.
When the White House opens press facilities generally to “bona fide journalists” — the Brady Briefing Room, for example — access cannot be denied arbitrarily or because officials dislike a journalist’s speech. That principle goes back to the D.C. Circuit’s 1977 decision in Sherrill v. Knight.
Trump has now gone well beyond leaving CNN out of the Oval Office pool.
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He has revoked ordinary White House access for entire news organizations because, by his own account, he objects to their journalism. “They purposely write negative news,” he said Friday.
Lawyers can argue about where precisely the First Amendment line falls. Presidents are better off staying well away from it.
Especially presidents who have spent years railing against censorship, government pressure on social media companies, and official efforts to suppress disfavored speech.
Trump began his second term with an executive order declaring government censorship undertaken to advance a “preferred narrative … intolerable in a free society.” Vice President JD Vance went to Munich weeks later and delivered a speech excoriating European governments for restricting disfavored speech.
Those principles are tested by speech you despise, not speech you welcome.
You cannot hate the media enough? Fine. Hate them.
Read somebody else. Watch somebody else. Mock them. Refute them. Support media companies that don’t hate your guts. Put every mistake the other guy makes on blast. When CNN or MS NOW botches a story, make them eat it for a month.
Bad journalism has a remedy in a free country: more speech.
Once government begins imposing penalties because officials despise the journalism, the question changes. It is no longer whether CNN deserves contempt. It is what power you are willing to give the state. Me? Not very much.
Barack Obama’s White House confronted the same temptation in 2009. Administration officials complained that Fox News operated more like an arm of the Republican Party than a news organization. When the White House tried to exclude Fox from a pool interview with a Treasury official, the other networks objected and threatened to pull out. The administration backed down.
Good.
Fox did not suddenly become acceptable in Obama’s sight. The administration stopped trying to settle an argument with a news organization by manipulating access.
Ronald Reagan had a better formulation. He had plenty of righteous complaints about hostile press coverage, but he called the antagonism between presidents and reporters “the friction of freedom.”
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A year later, Reagan acknowledged that presidents naturally try to use the press to their advantage and avoid situations that hurt them. The press could take care of itself, he said, and so could the president.
His preferred epitaph for a president’s relationship with reporters was simple: “He gave as good as he got.”
That’s about right.
Nobody is asking Trump to admire CNN or pretend bad journalism is good journalism simply because reporters invoke the First Amendment.
Fight them. But fight them with words. They call it the bully pulpit for a reason.
And forget CNN for a moment.
Every presidential practice sets a precedent. Anyone cheering presidential punishment of a despised news organization today should decide whether he wants the same rule administered someday by a president who thinks Fox News, Blaze News, or some other right-wing outlet traffics in “negative news.”
That isn’t an argument for CNN. It’s an argument for us.
The safest rules governing government power are the ones you can tolerate when your enemies administer them.
Trump may ultimately prevail on some of the constitutional argument here. The D.C. Circuit has already recognized broad presidential authority over access to restricted spaces. Revoking ordinary White House credentials because of hostile coverage presents a different question.
The First Amendment establishes a floor. A president who professes devotion to free speech should aim higher.
CNN doesn’t need defending. The principle does.
Let them in anyway.
That’s the friction of freedom.
Brian stelter, Censorship, Cnn, Donald trump, Fake news, First amendment, Free speech, Ms now, Opinion & analysis, Politico, Ronald reagan
