President Donald Trump’s war with the press hit a temporary stalemate Thursday as a federal judge restored White House access to CNN, MS NOW and Politico for two weeks. Last Friday, the president banned the three outlets, calling them “fake news,” as their journalists reported being blocked from accessing the White House.
In response, CNN, MS Now and Politico sued, and the Trump administration launched “Trump TV,” which is essentially a livestream of speeches and other reruns that apparently almost no one is even watching. During this week’s U.N. General Assembly, before giving a speech in which Trump mulled the annihilation of Iran, the president snarled at a reporter for asking him a question.
“You should not be here,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me.” Collins later said on air, “We never said we were never going to cover the president.”
Trump didn’t follow due process in the ban, according to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, who ordered the administration to restore their access as the case is litigated. Reporters from all three outlets thus began reporting at the White House again, but the move has raised questions of whether Trump could try again, this time following due process.
Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told NPR “The White House facility doesn’t need to let journalists in … But once it does … it cannot exclude journalists or news organizations because it doesn’t like what they report.”
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“Certainly, the trajectory has been in the direction of more restraints on press access than less,” Rottman added. “I think the public can easily wrap their head around the danger of the leader of the country retaliating against news organizations, denying them access because he doesn’t like their coverage.”
Trump did not mention the judge’s ruling but decried on Truth Social about CNN and MS Now’s “low ratings” that “have dropped considerably” and criticized their coverage of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
“Trump blocking access is bad, but what’s so annoying about Big Media folks’ self-righteous indignation is that the White House and Congress routinely deny credentials to smaller independent outlets and Big Media folks say nothing and show no solidarity,” David Sirota, a journalist and former senior advisor to Bernie Sander’s 2020 presidential campaign, said in a post on X. “They don’t actually care about the press freedom principles they are pretending to care about here. They care about their own access, their own business models, and virtue signaling to their own elite class of media.”
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