CNN, MS Now, and Politico jointly filed a lawsuit on Monday to overturn President Trump’s decision over the weekend to bar their reporters from the White House. This is an alarming escalation in the president’s wars against the media, independent institutions, control over public properties, and ultimately democracy itself. Federal judges must swiftly rule against the administration and declare that these organizations’ journalists immediately be allowed back into the White House. And if Trump continues to bar them, other reporters must follow them out the door.
Trump announced Friday in a Truth Social post that he was banning those three outlets from the White House, claiming that their coverage is “fake news.” While MS Now is left-leaning and very critical of Trump, it’s not exactly clear why he chose CNN and Politico. Those two outlets aim to be neutral and have, if anything, been too solicitous of our authoritarian president. (To be sure, Trump and his aides seem obsessed with and deeply frustrated by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.) And this was not an ideal threat. On Saturday and Sunday, journalists from these three outlets were blocked from the White House, and some have had their press badges either confiscated or deactivated by the Secret Service. And the president warned in his post, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”
I can’t say that this is an unusually terrible or unprecedented attack on the media, because Trump and his administration have already done so many horrible things on this front: briefly forcing Jimmy Kimmel off the air; filing groundless lawsuits against numerous news organizations; banning the Associated Press from covering certain White House events; firing the leadership of the military paper Stars and Stripes; creating super-onerous rules for reporting on the Department of Defense; drastically cutting funding for PBS and other public broadcasting. Some of that is legal. But it’s all authoritarian. Virtually all dictators try to undermine independent media. Pro-democracy Americans must continue to condemn and fight against Trump’s attacks on the media, even if we are no longer surprised by them.
And while Politico, CNN, and MS NOW are news outlets, they are more broadly both organizations independent of the government and not part of the MAGA. Trump is trying to destroy basically all of American civil society that’s not beholden to him or the Republican Party. So that’s universities, think tanks, law firms, activist groups, and any other organization that allows its employees to be critical of Trump. It’s important to see the banning of these three news outlets as part of his comprehensive attack on independent institutions.
Viewed in this context, this lawsuit should be a slam dunk. By barring these outlets from the White House, Trump is trying to limit their ability to cover and therefore criticize him. That’s against the spirit of the First Amendment. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, who has been assigned this case, should today restore White House access to CNN, Politico, and MS Now. The president should not have his authoritarian behavior rewarded by having these outlets barred from the White House even temporarily. (Kelly is a Trump appointee, but he ruled in favor of CNN’s Jim Acosta eight years ago after the Trump administration tried to ban him from the White House.)
Many people I respect, such as the Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, say that other news organizations should immediately pull their reporters from the White House, both in solidarity with the three banned outlets and to show their strong objections to Trump’s move. I would be fine if they took that step. I’m thrilled to see the major television networks (ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC) on Monday announced that they were suspending their usual “pool” coverage in protest of the ban on their colleagues.
But I’m okay with news organizations continuing to enter the White House in the next few days under two conditions. First, they should be repeatedly highlighting the exclusion of CNN, Politico, and MS NOW.
Second, they should be prepared to walk. If Judge Kelly rules in favor of Trump’s exclusion, a ruling is delayed for several days, or Trump refuses to comply with an order to let these outlets back in the White House, then other news organizations must collectively boycott. There is an important principle here: No president should be able to dictate which outlets cover him. If Trump succeeds in stopping Collins and MS NOW in particular from being in the White House, anyone who covers this White House critically will be a clear target for a ban. That can’t be allowed to happen.
Some media critics and journalists themselves argue that the importance of reporters having access to the White House and asking questions of the president and senior administration officials is overstated. The best reporting, they argue, comes from journalists seeking information on their own, not receiving it from government officials at press conferences. I agree that investigative journalism is superior. That said, the problem is news outlets being so obsessed with getting exclusive interviews and other special access from government officials that they soften their coverage. Having access to government officials is not inherently bad and can be useful. I want journalists from MS NOW and other explicitly anti-authoritarian outlets to be questioning Trump and his aides in public at the White House. That coverage can supplement their investigative reporting.
The exclusion of these outlets is part of Trump’s wars on the media and independent organizations. It’s also part of a third war: His attempt to wrestle control of public properties and lands and instead treat them as essentially parts of a Trump Empire. There are numerous examples of this tendency: destroying the White House East Wing to build a ballroom; trying to rename the Kennedy Center after himself; barring reporters from certain parts of the Pentagon; his proposal to build a new arch in Washington, D.C; undermining the head of the Smithsonian until he resigned.
Past presidents have treated government buildings and public lands in D.C. as owned by the American public. They have often sought to expand access to them. They haven’t changed them without extensive buy-in from historians, members of Congress, and others. In contrast, Trump acts like the Kennedy Center, the White House, the Pentagon, and the area around the National Mall are essentially one big Trump hotel in Washington, D.C. In his view, he controls who has access to these venues and how they should look.
He is seeking to turn the Kennedy Center into a space where only art that Trump agrees with is performed and the White House into a space where only journalism that Trump agrees with can be created. That’s very authoritarian and must be stopped.
You might feel like Trump coverage from CNN and Politico too often falls into false equivalence. You might think that MS NOW’s journalists can describe how terrible of a president Trump is without ever setting foot in the White House. I agree on both counts. But this is a big deal. The White House is the people’s house. A robust news media is part of our democracy. We need to make sure that Politico, MS NOW, and CNN are let back in the White House—and that after 2028, a wannabe-dictator like Donald Trump is never allowed to live there again.
