Free press prevails at the White House
Be careful going anywhere near the White House these days. You might get caught in the crossfire between Donald Trump and the press corps.
Warning: Be careful going anywhere near the White House these days. You might get caught in the crossfire between Donald Trump and the White House press corps. It’s all-out war, but the media’s won the first skirmish.
Relations between Trump and reporters have been tense for three years, starting with the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump attacked the media at every rally: accusing news outlets of bias, encouraging supporters to harass assembled reporters, criticizing some reporters by name, banning others from his rallies.
Things got even worse once Trump was in the White House, with his nonstop complaints about “fake news,” his Stalinesque labeling of the media as “the enemy of the American people” and his appointment of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who does nothing but exude hatred of the press at every briefing, as White House press secretary.
But Trump’s anti-media bias spun out of control last week at his post-midterm news conference, when he personally lashed out at CNN’s Jim Acosta, NBC’s Peter Alexander, April Ryan of Urban Radio Networks, and Yamiche Alcindor of “PBS NewsHour” — and followed the next day by accusing CNN’s Abby Phillips of asking a “stupid question.” Yes, Trump publicly insulted three African-American women in two days. Never have we seen such rude, intemperate and boorish behavior from any president.
Even that wasn’t enough for Trump. Sanders followed up by yanking Acosta’s White House credentials, falsely accusing him — based on a clearly doctored video — of physically assaulting a White House intern. Forced to drop that charge, she still banned him from the White House for “grandstanding” and refusing to surrender the microphone. Trump, meanwhile, gleefully threatened to remove credentials from even more reporters.
For CNN and other news outlets, that was it. Trump had finally crossed the line. CNN sued Trump for violating Acosta’s First Amendment rights — and was immediately joined by the White House Correspondents Association and 13 of the biggest names in journalism, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, NBC News, Politico, AP, Bloomberg, USA Today, Gannett, the National Press Club. And yes, even Fox News, which released a statement declaring: “Secret Service passes for working White House journalists should never be weaponized.”
As a member of the White House Correspondents Association and frequent CNN guest commentator, all I can say is: BRAVO! It’s about time the press corps stood up to big bully Donald Trump. Sure, the president deserves to be treated with respect. But so do the men and women who cover him. He may not like tough questions, but it’s their job to ask them.
Of course, Trump’s hardly the first president or vice president to clash with reporters. John Adams complained about the press, as did Thomas Jefferson and every president since. Dwight Eisenhower blasted “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators.” Spiro Agnew famously denounced “nattering nabobs of negativism” and charged: “Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of birdcages.” Even Barack Obama once so got so annoyed with Fox News he threatened to ban them from press events until an outraged and united press corps forced him to back down.
But no president has shown the outright hostility toward the media that Donald Trump displays on a daily basis: attacks which not only undermine public confidence in the media but also, more and more, put reporters’ lives at risk. When news organizations have to hire their own security guards to protect reporters at Trump rallies, it makes you wonder what country we live in.
Based on both the law and precedent, most legal scholars rated CNN’s lawsuit a slam dunk. After all, a 1977 ruling in the same D.C. Circuit Court found that the White House could not deny a press pass “arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” And a 1964 Supreme Court decision held that the First Amendment protects speech even when the president doesn’t like it.
Sure enough, Judge Timothy J. Kelly ruled against the White House, ordering it to restore Acosta’s press pass, at least temporarily. That’s not only a big victory for CNN, but for the entire nation. The Founding Fathers recognized that our democracy cannot survive without a free and independent media. And no president should have the power to dictate which reporters can cover him, and which ones can’t.
Ironically, the same day it was in court attacking Jim Acosta, the Trump administration admonished China and Myanmar to stop punishing reporters and political dissidents. The Trump White House believes in freedom of the press, in other words — just not here in the United States.