President’s press restrictions hurt Americans' right to know about their government

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Tensions between the press and president aren’t new. What is new is the Trump administration’s level of aggression against the news media. Left unchecked, the hostility stands to hinder Americans’ right to know about their government.

Under the direction of President Donald Trump, the FCC has already opened investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and NPR. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has ejected several mainstream media organizations from their assigned workspaces at the Pentagon and replaced them with conservative outlets. Additionally, the White House has denied access to the Associated Press because the worldwide news service has continued to call the Gulf of Mexico just that, instead of the Trump-decreed Gulf of America, a renaming that is not recognized internationally. And just this week the administration announced a new policy on the presidential press pool, the reporting cohort that represents the rest of their colleagues — and the country — in limited-access spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One.

The reporters granted access will now be chosen by the administration, not the 111-year-old White House Correspondents’ Association, which since the Eisenhower administration has developed an equitable rotation of reporters to “ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners.”

A venerable member of the White House press corps is Peter Baker, who has covered presidents for all but four years of his 17-year New York Times tenure. Regardless of one’s political perspective, “It should matter to all Americans if the person with the most power in the country is picking who are the reporters who get to ask him questions,” Baker said in an interview.

There is no presidential precedence in modern times for such a move, Baker said, adding with its restrictions of the AP — which news organizations around the world, including the Minnesota Star Tribune, rely on, “they have sent a message to everybody else as well: You too can be kicked out if we don’t like what you write about us, so be careful what you write.”

Last week a Trump-appointed judge declined to immediately intervene in the case, prompting the White House to project images in the briefing room of “VICTORY” stamped over a map of the “Gulf of America.”

But is it a victory for the American public when any administration insists it can dictate language?

After all, the AP’s Gulf guideline was neither ideological nor political but practical and rational for a body of water globally recognized for 400 years as the Gulf of Mexico. And the news organization recognized and reflected Trump’s authority to rename Alaska’s Mt. Denali to Mt. McKinley and thus accordingly adapted its style guidance, which is widely followed by news organizations. But taken to its logical extreme, if the AP yielded would Trump then insist on news organizations referring to Canada as “the 51st state” like the president trolls on social media? Or, even more ominous and even Orwellian, demand that news organizations repeat the lie that he won the 2020 election?

“Retaliating against AP — one of the world’s leading providers of fact-based news — for its content undermines the U.S. president’s stated commitment to free speech and prevents its audience in the U.S. and abroad from getting the news,” Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a statement.

Another media-freedom organization, Reporters Without Borders, is equally resolute on the AP and press pool issues. “You can’t really disentangle them,” Executive Director Clayton Weimers said in an interview. Regarding White House access, Weimers said “it’s completely inappropriate for the White House to get to choose the journalists who cover it. That’s the sort of thing you expect in authoritarian regimes.”

Like in Russia, where Baker was a correspondent for the four years he wasn’t in Washington. While he rightly resists conflating the Kremlin and the White House, Baker said that “the notion that the people in power decide which reporters are part of the pool is exactly what happened to the Kremlin in the early days of [Russian President] Vladimir Putin. They essentially converted the Kremlin press pool into a collection of reporters who knew that they had to toe the line and therefore the people who were warned, in effect, that there might be consequences. So for somebody who spent time in Moscow that felt very familiar.”

Karoline Leavitt, the administration’s press secretary, said in announcing the press pool policy that “the White House will be restoring power back to the American people.”

Not so, retorted Jacqui Heinrich, senior White House correspondent at Fox News, who said via social media that “This move does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House.”

Baker recalled a previous press-president showdown when the Obama White House tried to exclude Fox from an event. “It was the rest of us who said ‘No, that’s not right, you can’t pick and choose based on your feeling about their coverage.’ ” The Obama administration backed down. “I think the important message that we sent at that time is that was not about ideology, not about party, it’s about who decides: the government or independent news organizations how they do their work.”

On the first day of the policy Reuters and the AP were substituted by Newsmax and the Blaze, two unmistakably administration-supporting networks.

“Press freedom,” concluded Weimers, “is about every American’s First Amendment right to have access to reliable information. That’s why it is specifically called out in the First Amendment to the Constitution, because our founding fathers recognize the press plays a vital role in maintaining our democratic institutions.”