The First Amendment is the cornerstone of the republic and it is absolute in what it protects. Journalists may report what they want. They may be wrong, unfair, and even invent false narratives and then sell it as news. At the same time, the public may choose to believe or ignore these reports. There is nothing in the First Amendment, however, that requires the president of the United States invite the people with an axe to grind into the room where he works.
President Donald Trump’s recent decision to bar CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House has been spun up as the radical left’s latest outrage or “constitutional crisis” du jour. Yet, the banned outlets still maintain every right to publish, stand on a sidewalk, file FOIA requests, interview sources, and tell their audience whatever story they prefer. Nothing about their traditional journalist role that is protected by the First Amendment has changed.
Denying these journalists a hard pass, a camera riser, or a chance to grandstand at a briefing does not stop them from speaking. It stops them from using the People’s House as a stage and the presidency as a prop.
This distinction is not new, and it is not partisan except when convenient. Under former President Joe Biden, the White House tightened hard-pass rules, culled credentials, and made access harder for reporters who did not fit their preferred profile. Conservative outlets felt the cancel culture first and said so loudly. The outrage from the Left was selective at best.
Access to a government building is not the same thing as the right to speak. One is a privilege managed for security, space, and order. The other is a right the government may never alter.
There is no serious claim that these journalists are, in any way, silenced. They still have studios, websites, correspondents, audiences, and airwaves provided by the taxpayer for the public good. They can still report the same public events from outside the fence. A real reporter does not need a government briefing to discover what the government is doing. Spoon-fed talking points are convenience, not journalism. If their work is honest, it can be done without a reserved chair and a microphone pointed at the president for the evening package. Besides, they rarely report the actual answers from the West Wing press briefings.
The outlets now heading to court insist that the government may not decide what the press reports. That is true, and it is also not at all what happened. Nobody has ordered CNN or MS Now to change a headline, or Politico to spike a story. The administration has said, in effect, that it will not host the same people who treat every appearance as an opportunity to insult, disrupt, and litigate the presidency in real time. That is a judgment about access, not a prior restraint on publication. Courts have long understood that the White House is not a public forum in the same way a park or a street corner is. Presidents of both parties have limited who stands in the room. The lawsuits are doomed on multiple constitutional issues, the biggest probably being the separation of powers.
For more than a decade now, a sizable share of the media elite told the public that Trump could not win, then that he barely won, then that he was an illegitimate accident of the Electoral College or a few distant Russian Facebook hackers. Polls and commentary that would have produced President Hillary Clinton and later President Kamala Harris were treated as settled fact until voters rendered a different verdict. The same institutions now demand that the man they spent a decade trying to destroy must still roll out the red carpet. They have a right to dislike him, refuse to write anything flattering, or even a little that is accurate, fair, or evenhanded. At the same time, he has the right not to hand them the best camera angle from which to distort the facts.
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This president has been shot at. He has lived under a constant spray of rhetoric that treats him as a unique threat to the country. Words have consequences even when they are protected. Journalists who treat contempt as a beat should not be shocked when the target of that contempt declines to keep the appointment.
People already vote with the remote. Ratings have told the story for a long time. People can read, watch, and decide for themselves. They do not need the White House to subsidize the performance. The First Amendment protects freedom of the press from the state. It does not conscript the president into the press’s production schedule. The Constitution was written by people who knew both liberty and power, and who refused to confuse the two.
Shaun McCutcheon is a free speech advocate, an Alabama-based electrical engineer, the founder of Multipolar, and was the successful plaintiff in the 2014 Supreme Court case McCutcheon v. FEC.