Soon after President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban CNN, MSNOW and POLITICO from the press pool, his administration was hit with lawsuits. Another suit filed against Trump this week in the federal district court in New York is a bit different.
“Some of the media organizations that have been targeted under the policy have sued, seeking restoration of their access,” explained The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which filed the suit Monday along with the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School (MFIA). “The lawsuit filed today differs from those other lawsuits both because it is filed on behalf of ordinary citizens rather than media organizations, and because it seeks broader relief – not just reinstatement of individual media organizations’ access but a broad injunction that would protect the entire White House press corps from the threat of retaliation and protect the public’s access to independent reporting about the president and his policies.”
Six plaintiffs are named in the case: Kenneth Roth, a human rights advocate, legal scholar, and lecturer at Yale Law School and the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs; Daniel Froomkin, a media and political journalist and editor of Press Watch and Heads Up News; Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor at Yale University, Peter Schmidt-Nowara, a civics and social studies teacher at a New York City high school; Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Ethan Young, a student at the University of Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian.
According to the suit, spaces the government has opened to White House journalists are a “public forum” under the First Amendment. Per a press release from the Knight First Amendment Institute, that forum is protected and allows the public to know what the government is doing.
“The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “When the White House expels reporters because of their coverage and threatens others with expulsion, it isn’t just the press that suffers – the public loses access to independent reporting and gets something closer to government propaganda.”
While the lawsuit filed by CNN, MSNOW and POLITICO proceeds, the Trump administration has been blocked from its ban on the outlets, NBC News reported. In his announcement that he wanted to ban the outlets, Trump accused them of publishing “fake” news about him. He has made such claims before about a variety of outlets – from The New York Times to Fox News – and continued to after the lawsuit, even calling on reporters to be arrested.
Reporters have been covering U.S. presidents for decades as part of a “pool” of journalists. President Richard M. Nixon’s administration, a press room was installed over an actual swimming pool President Franklin D. Roosevelt used to use. Over the weekend, Trump dismissed rumors that he planned to bring the swimming pool back.
David A. Schulz, director of Yale Law School’s MFIA and co-counsel in the case filed this week, said: “As the Supreme Court has emphasized repeatedly, journalists are the public's ‘eyes and ears’ in spaces they can’t access. The president’s policy of expelling disfavored journalists harms the public and our democracy.”
In the Trump White House, there’s a different perspective.
“No person may demand access to the Oval Office Media that pedal misinformation and defamation are completely capable of reporting their manufactured stories from directly outside,” a White House official said in response to the new suit, according to POLITICO.
