This essay was originally published by The Dispatch on Sept. 28, 2026.
When President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, he promised to “restore freedom of speech.” He reneged weeks later, trying to limit the Associated Press’ access over its decision not to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. And his administration has threatened regulatory action against networks over commentary by late-night comedians.
But he made his most direct attack on free speech September 18 when he kicked reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico out of the White House. The administration cited unsubstantiated “national security” concerns after originally complaining the outlets published “purposely negative stories.”
The three outlets took the White House to court last Wednesday, winning a temporary restraining order early Thursday morning. The court reaffirmed long-standing precedent in its ruling: “The loss of constitutional freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.” The order lasts for 14 days, but should the court make it last while the case proceeds, Trump will be able to appeal.
Not only do the news outlets have strong constitutional grounds to stand on, but they can also point to America’s rich history of independent reporting. For nearly 130 years, reporters have worked inside the White House, and presidents of both parties have bristled at what they wrote. That friction almost always was resolved through negotiation, ground rules, and reporters standing up for one another.
Courts stepped in only when that arrangement broke down. Trump has shattered it.
A bulwark of liberty
The independent press is sewn into our country’s fabric. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The American project, were it to succeed, required information to come from the people — not from the government.
His home state of Virginia adopted the following language in its own Declaration of Rights: “The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic Governments.” Many other states followed suit.
But as president, Jefferson bristled at the press. In 1807, he wrote: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” And that followed years of Federalist Party censorship under the Sedition Act. President John Adams used the law to lock up opposition printers, like Benjamin Franklin Bache, who defended the French Revolution and sharply criticized both Washington and Adams.
The public ultimately rejected the Sedition Act, and the Federalists went extinct.
Birth of the White House press corps
By the end of the 19th century, a true White House press corps began to emerge. When a man named William “Fatty” Price started staking out staff and guests outside the White House’s North Portico, his Washington Evening Star column took off. Other reporters quickly caught on and began to chase leads on the White House grounds. A permanent White House beat was born. By early 1898, President William McKinley had given a table in the White House’s second-floor corridor to Price and his self-proclaimed “newspaper gang.” At the same time, McKinley’s staff asked reporters to stick to those “proper facilities.”
Since then, there’s been press inside the White House. That’s come with its own challenges, and many presidents have tried to limit press they found hostile.
The fact that this relationship has lasted for so long — despite many bumps in the road — points to our Constitution’s strength. It points to the perseverance of a fundamental free-speech value: We allow the people to tell the story, not the government.
Under that new setup, Price wrote, there was “no giving out of prepared news … Sometimes it’s a question of hard digging, as the miner put it, to unravel a story.”
While “hard digging” was bound to bother some presidents, the relationship was mutually beneficial. Presidents gained a regular channel to the public, while reporters gained access inside the White House, letting them independently observe and report on the presidency.
Rise of the White House Correspondents’ Association
Some tension, however, was inevitable. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson made what he understood to be an off-the-record remark about the ongoing Mexican Revolution. When the comment appeared in a New York newspaper, Wilson was “furious” and threatened to end presidential press conferences altogether.
He didn’t. Instead, Washington correspondents proposed rules to formalize White House access, and Wilson agreed. Reporters would not quote the president without his consent, and attendance was limited to accredited journalists. Six months later, after another dispute over stock market “tipsters” crowding into Wilson’s press room, White House reporters formed their own organization to police the rules: the White House Correspondents’ Association, headed by Fatty Price.
Reporters and the president were now treating their inevitable tension as something to manage — not a reason to shut the press out. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge told his press pool that accurate reporting of the presidency was “rather necessary to the carrying on of our republican institutions.” Coolidge didn’t think that meant dictating his own account of what happened inside the White House. He preferred to leave that work to the reporters, who could draw their own conclusions and interpretations — what Coolidge called the “art of reporting.”
Three years later, at his final press conference, Coolidge emphasized that point: “I have left the work of reporting the affairs of my administration to the experts of the press. Perhaps that is the reason that the reports have been more successful than they would have been if I had undertaken myself to direct them.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt further empowered the White House press corps’ independence. At his first presidential press conference in 1933, FDR scrapped the practice of requiring reporters to submit written questions in advance. He understood the political risk of that move, telling reporters they would ask questions that, as he put it, “I do not want to discuss, or I am not ready to discuss, or I do not know anything about.”
He opened the floor anyway.
Eventually, however, courts had to answer the question of what would happen if a president tried to remove such access.
The courts weigh in
In the 1977 case Sherrill v. Knight, the Secret Service had denied journalist Robert Sherrill a White House press pass, citing vague security concerns. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that “arbitrary or content-based criteria for press pass issuance are prohibited under the first amendment.” The White House did not have to “open its doors to the press, conduct press conferences, or operate press facilities” in the first place. But once it had chosen to do so, the court said, access could not be denied arbitrarily.
If that’s the case, some might say, then what about President Barack Obama’s attempts to marginalize Fox News? What about President Joe Biden’s limits on White House press badges?
If Trump can ban any news outlet whose reporting he dislikes from the White House halls, a future Democratic president could just as easily ban Newsmax, Fox News, or Breitbart.
Those are fair questions. The Obama administration excluded Fox News from some interviews with a Treasury official. That was wrong. Fox News never challenged the decision in court, but Sherrill and other important precedents probably would’ve stood in the government’s way. Other major news organizations rallied behind Fox News (just as they have rallied behind CNN, MS NOW, and Politico today) by refusing to interview the Treasury official unless Fox News was let into the pool. The administration backed down.
The Biden policy was different. In 2023, the Biden administration instructed every hard-pass holder to reapply under new criteria, including full-time employment at a news organization and a Washington-area address. That was constitutional because the rules were viewpoint-neutral and applied to everyone — no matter what they published.
Press access may be a privilege, but “privilege” is not a magic word that allows the government to avoid constitutional problems. Neither is “national security” — at least not without significant proof from the government that some security interest is at stake. And Judge Timothy Kelly, the Trump appointee who just ordered the White House to reinstate the banned outlets’ access, agreed. He held that “the record lacks factual support” for Trump’s contention that revoking access will protect national security.
The First Amendment does not obligate the president to open up any area of the White House to reporters. But once the White House does create a space for the press to gather news and ask questions, it can’t exclude reporters “merely because public officials oppose the speaker’s view.” And even policies that are reasonable and neutral on their face, such as protecting national security, are unconstitutional if they lack factual support or the government uses them as a pretext to punish disfavored speakers.
That’s exactly what the Trump administration is doing here, and it hasn’t hidden its reasons. Trump announced the ban on the outlets “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS.” He also attributed the ban to “cumulative stories over the last few years.” Vice President J.D. Vance was just as direct. He claimed that about 92 percent of the three outlets’ stories on the administration were negative and called their coverage “effectively far-left propaganda.”
Reporters belong in the people’s house
Whether these outlets are fair to the president is beside the point. Ever since Fatty Price first staked out his place on the White House beat, reporters of various persuasions have roamed the building’s halls. That’s always been a good thing. The American people benefit from seeing different accounts of what’s going on in the nation’s highest office. Judge Learned Hand put it best in a line the Sherrill court quoted: “Right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues, than through any kind of authoritative selection.”
The history of the White House and its press corps is full of presidents who were tempted to do what Trump has done but didn’t. Even Jefferson, a free-press evangelist, complained that nothing in a newspaper could be believed. Whether it was Wilson threatening to end press conferences or Obama limiting Fox News’ access to pool interviews, other reporters ultimately stepped in and helped refine the arrangement. Courts were an avenue of last resort.
Ultimately, though, this isn’t just about CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. If Trump can ban any news outlet whose reporting he dislikes from the White House halls, a future Democratic president could just as easily ban Newsmax, Fox News, or Breitbart. It’s often the outlets a president perceives as most hostile to his cause that stand to reveal the most about his administration.
And those revelations are a gift to both the public and the president. They are the lifeblood of democracy, allowing the people to hold their leaders accountable and the president to improve his administration.
But the whole media circus at the White House is kind of a joke, isn’t it? They sit there and listen to somebody chant the latest party line. What is accomplished?