CNN’s lawyers have a problem, and it isn’t the First Amendment. It’s the word “access,” and President Trump is right to restrict access to anyone – and any entity, including the press – from the White House.
On Friday, an exasperated Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House because he’s sick and tired of the bogus ‘reporting’ that is misleading to the very public they are duty-bound to keep informed. Cue the “but muh First Amendment” whining. How predictable, but let’s examine that.
The Constitution protects the right to publish. It says nothing about seating charts. No text, no precedent, and no tradition establishes that a particular corporation is owed a chair in the Brady Briefing Room, a slot in the travel pool, or a shouted question over the rotors of Marine One. Those are courtesies extended by the executive branch, allocated by the executive branch, and — like every other courtesy in American life — revocable by the party extending them. CNN, Politico, and MS NOW may publish whatever they wish tonight. They are simply going to have to do it from their own buildings.
The howling this week has treated that distinction as though it doesn’t exist, which tells you how thoroughly these outlets came to see federal property as an annex of their newsrooms. For sixty years the White House Correspondents’ Association ran the press pool as a closed guild, deciding among themselves which journalists got proximity to the most powerful office on earth. That arrangement appears in no statute. It was a cartel wearing the costume of a public trust, and its members are discovering that what a president grants, a president can withdraw.
They cannot plead ignorance of the principle, either — it was theirs. For a decade these were the institutions arguing that no one is owed a platform, that access to an audience is conditional on conduct, that deplatforming is not censorship because the government isn’t doing it. Fine. The conduct in question here is on videotape. A correspondent standing before a burning building while the chyron reports mostly peaceful protests. Covington, where a high schooler was made a national villain on footage the network never bothered to watch through, and which ended in a settlement. Smollett, run as fact because it flattered the newsroom’s assumptions. Three years insisting the country’s own eyes were lying about a visibly failing president, followed by a hasty pivot to selling books about the cover-up.
Every one of those failures ran the same direction. That is not the signature of sloppiness. It is the signature of a worldview with a news division attached.
Politico’s grievance is thinner still. Federal agencies were routing millions of taxpayer dollars a year into subscriptions to a publication covering those same agencies. Reverse the partisan valence and imagine the coverage — a year-long investigation with its own theme music. Instead it was a line item the press corps found unworthy of curiosity, and now the beneficiary is aggrieved about a badge.
There is precedent, too, and it isn’t Republican. The Obama White House tried to freeze Fox News out of an interview rotation and the same correspondents now invoking democracy’s twilight described it as shrewd message discipline.
Nothing has been banned. Nothing has been shut down. Three networks have lost a privilege while keeping every right they actually possess. If the result is a smaller audience, they should take that up with the product.
