The White House press room has seen plenty of grudges over the past two centuries, but it has rarely seen the doors actually locked. That’s the situation facing CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, whose credentials were pulled on September 18 in a move the Trump administration justified by pointing to what it called “fake news” β reporting officials said endangered national security by peddling “fictions and lies” about the presidency.
The three outlets sued to get back in, and on September 22 the Department of Justice argued in court that the president holds the authority to bar media organizations when national security concerns arise. The department’s letters revoking the passes cited coverage it said “threatened national security and spread falsehoods” and accused the outlets of failing to meet “basic minimum” standards of professionalism and decorum expected of those granted White House access.
It didn’t hold β at least not yet. Federal Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee from the president’s first term, restored the three outlets’ access for at least two weeks while the case proceeds. Kelly reasoned that White House access is a privilege rather than a right, but concluded the ban likely ran afoul of reporters’ constitutional due process protections. The restraining order is set to expire October 8.
A Longer History Than the Headlines Suggest
Writing in American Thinker, Janet Levy argues that the current standoff looks less like a rupture and more like the latest chapter in a very old story. Presidents have been fighting the press since the founding era, she notes, and the tactics have often been considerably harsher than pulling a press pass.
Levy leans on Harold Holzer, the Lincoln Prize-winning historian and author of The Presidents vs. the Press, who documented how Abraham Lincoln enlisted the State, Post Office, and Interior Departments β along with the army β to crack down on newspapers owned and edited by his political opponents. One editor, Frank Key Howard, grandson of Francis Scott Key, was imprisoned for 14 months over critical editorials.
The tradition crossed party lines. Franklin Roosevelt used the Federal Communications Commission to pressure commentators who criticized the New Deal, threatening them with license revocation. Lyndon Johnson deployed what came to be known as the “Johnson treatment” β late-night phone calls to reporters and network executives, denial of access, and offers to boost a newspaper’s circulation if it played nice. Johnson also had the FBI wiretap and investigate Vietnam War critics.
More recent examples are milder but still telling, according to Levy. Richard Nixon told his press secretary in 1972 that no Washington Post reporter was ever to be in the White House except at press conferences. Barack Obama tried to keep Fox News out of an interview with his executive-pay czar, Kenneth R. Feinberg, in 2009. Joe Biden reduced the number of passes granting unaccompanied access to press areas in 2023.
The Legal Question: What Counts as a Lie?
The harder issue, Levy writes, is definitional. What actually constitutes a falsehood, and does the First Amendment protect saying one? The courts have drawn fine lines. In United States v. Alvarez, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in 2012 that false statements do not automatically lose constitutional protection simply because they are untrue. The government cannot criminalize a lie unless it causes legally recognizable harm.
That case involved Xavier Alvarez, who claimed at a public meeting to be a retired Marine and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. He was prosecuted under the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made lying about military medals a crime. The Court struck the law down, distinguishing categories like fraud, perjury, and defamation β where falsehoods can be punished because additional elements such as materiality, reliance, or cognizable harm are present. Defamation involving presidents and other public figures is further governed by the “actual malice” standard from New York Times v. Sullivan. Congress responded by passing a revised Stolen Valor Act in 2013, targeting false military claims made to obtain tangible benefits.
What the Public Thinks
Levy points to Pew Research Center data suggesting Americans are of two minds. Seventy-three percent of respondents called press freedom “extremely or very” important. Yet a majority backed specific government restrictions on reporting that touches national security or contains outright falsehoods. Fifty-three percent said preventing inaccurate reporting mattered more than absolute press freedom, while 45 percent said freedom of the press was paramount even if some reporting was inaccurate. And 81 percent said news outlets should issue public corrections when they get something wrong.
The president’s supporters in the administration have framed the ban in exactly those terms. Attorney General Todd Blanche told ABC News’s Martha Raddatz that Trump was “sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news,” describing the decision as the product of “years and years of one-sided media coverage” that was “not fair to the American people and represented a national security problem for foreign relations.” Blanche added that coverage need not be positive β but that accuracy was non-negotiable.
A Fight With No Obvious Exit
The confrontation has already reshaped the mechanics of White House coverage. In 2025, Trump announced that the White House Correspondents’ Association β which had organized the rotating presidential press pool since its founding in 1914 β would no longer decide which outlets travel with the president when space is limited. The president’s press office took over the function. Then, on September 21, the White House launched what it called Trump TV: The Essentials Station, a channel a spokesman described as “a 24/7 livestream of the administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered,” featuring events like the president’s Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore and a later address in Kentucky.
The press corps has not stood idle. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provides pro bono legal services to journalists, filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing the ban is unconstitutional, and 50 news organizations signed on. The Associated Press and several major television and news networks suspended coverage of the president’s activities in response to the ban.
As for what comes next, the administration has signaled it will defend the ban and challenge long-standing precedents governing White House access when Judge Kelly resumes hearings on a longer-term injunction. Trump has indicated he intends to appeal the restraining order, though no formal appeal had been filed as of the article’s publication. Levy’s conclusion is less a prediction than a posture: the president, she writes, is in no mood to back down β and the ability to speak freely, in her framing, remains central to the republic.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/the-president-versus-the-mainstream-media/