There has always been a gulf between the Trump administration and media professionals who won’t bend to his will.
Facts, according to Donald Trump, are “fake news.” The press is the “enemy of the American people.” His ire runs so deep that in November, Trump demanded that Republicans kill a federal shield law — approved by a Republican-controlled House — that would protect journalists from disclosing their sources and other information to the government. U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., heeded Trump’s order and blocked the bill in the Senate a month later.
But now the White House has taken its latest beef, against the Associated Press, to a new level — and its actions go beyond being an affront to fact-based journalism and a free press to become a slap in the face to the American public at large.
On Tuesday, in defiance of long-standing practice, the White House announced that it would take control of which news organizations are allowed in the press pool covering the president. It’s a job that traditionally has been carried out by the White House Correspondents Association. Wire services that are widely used by other media outlets — AP, but also Reuters and Bloomberg — will no longer have a permanent spot in every pool.
The administration says it’s trying to make room for other media. But it seems clear that Trump’s move is another manifestation of his dangerous appetite to quash any news coverage that isn’t guaranteed to be flattering, and to obstruct the media from doing its job to keep Americans informed.
What else should anyone make of this, given that it all started with a decision that offended the president’s ego: the AP’s refusal to change its style and refer to the Gulf of Mexico as he “Gulf of America,” in accordance with Trump’s executive order. (For the record, most of the gulf’s waters lie outside U.S. jurisdiction.) AP reporters and photographers were then banned from press events at the White House and Air Force One.
What other outlets will the White House kick out, as soon as they write something the president doesn’t like?
‘Clearly viewpoint discrimination’
AP sued three Trump administration officials over the ban, but it will remain in place until at least late next month, when U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden may rule on overturning it.
In an ideal world, McFadden would have granted the AP a temporary injunction and immediately restored its access to presidential events. But the judge (a Trump appointee) rejected the request and said the AP had not demonstrated it had suffered any irreparable harm by being blocked.
The White House wasted no time celebrating by displaying two monitors in the briefing room that read “Gulf of America” and “Victory.”
Trump officials must not have been paying attention to what else McFadden had to say in court. He described the ban as “problematic” and urged the Trump administration to reconsider its position, saying that “case law in this circuit is uniformly unhelpful to the White House.”
“It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden told a government attorney.
There’s a good argument to be made that reporters should put less emphasis on access to those in power, and spend more time reporting on the impact of what the powerful do. We’d like to see more of that. But that doesn’t make the White House move any less troubling. As White House Correspondents Association President Eugene Daniels said, Trump’s move “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. … In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”
If the ban against the AP isn’t lifted and the president continues to attack the media, the biggest foe to press freedom, the First Amendment and the rights of the American public to know what their government is up to will be the man sitting in the Oval Office.
The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.
Get Opinions content delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
More about the Sun-Times Editorial Board at chicago.suntimes.com/about/editorial-board