Power prefers to be watched by those it chooses. In Washington this year the choosing has been done with unusual frankness — outlets barred from the briefing room, from the pool, from Air Force One — and on Monday the argument over who may watch the president arrived again in federal court, this time carried not by news organizations but by their readers.
A group of private citizens sued the Trump administration on Monday in a federal court in New York over its restrictions on news outlets covering the White House, Al Jazeera reported. Their claim is a quiet inversion of the usual press-freedom case: the injury, they say, is theirs. When a reporter is shut out, the reader is blindfolded too.
All of the Plaintiffs rely on the White House press corps for independent reporting about the president and his administration, and all of them use that reporting in a variety of ways in their scholarship, teaching, journalism, or advocacy
The plaintiffs, the filing says, are losing access to vital information that the outlets covering Trump used to provide. It is the logic of the chain of custody applied to news: contaminate the source, and everything downstream is contaminated with it.
The suit lands in the middle of a longer siege. The White House this autumn banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from its grounds, invoking national security — a justification the outlets called a cover for retribution, and which a federal judge has so far declined to accept. Earlier this month, Judge Timothy Kelly signaled he would extend the block on the ban, calling the Justice Department’s national-security defense “an uphill climb.” Days before that hearing, the administration barred Politico from the press pool on Air Force One, and the seat went to no one at all — rival outlets refused to take it.
Until now the courtroom fights have been the outlets’ own. Monday’s filing asks the courts to consider the other end of the transaction — the reader of the pool report, the viewer of the briefing — and to decide whether an administration that picks its chroniclers also picks, in effect, what the citizen may know. Regimes have always understood that controlling the messenger is easier than controlling the message. The plaintiffs’ wager is that the law sees the audience too.