The Patriot Post® · Trump Tosses Out ‘Fake News’ Purveyors

If it’s up to President Donald Trump, reporters from CNN, MSNOW (formerly MSNBC), and Politico won’t be darkening the doors of the White House anytime soon. In a dramatic announcement Friday, the president declared he was banning the “fake news” of those three outlets, effective immediately, and planned to ban more soon.

On Truth Social Monday, Trump posted:

The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Predictably, the outlets sued on Monday. Also in response, Fox News joined ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC in suspending pool coverage.

As for the legal prospects, Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, the White House correspondent of The Daily Signal, pointed out, “A judge ruled last year that the White House cannot bar Associated Press reporters and photographers from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other spaces for journalists.” (After further court action, that AP ban remains in effect for “restricted” spaces.)

The AP ban stemmed from the outlet’s refusal to call the body of water along our southern coast the Gulf of America; this new ban stems from repeated offenses by CNN, MSNOW, and Politico.

“The three corporate outlets are well known for advancing hoaxes and giving unquestioning favorable coverage to Democrats, tantamount to in-kind political donations,” reported The Federalist’s Breccan Thies. “Each outlet’s abuses are too many to count, and most of them overlap, but there are some particularly egregious ones.” Thies, who, like Mitchell, is the White House correspondent for his media company, went on to describe a litany of abuses from these outlets, noting, “Each outlet is infamous for coverage that skews radically to the left.”

Notably, the Associated Press also maintained its front-and-center position in the White House briefing room, even as the court cases over the ban have rolled on. The White House Correspondents’ Association determines the positioning, and it has kept the front two rows for establishment news organizations for decades. (As an example, the four major alphabet networks sit in the along with Reuters, the AP, and CNN.) Politico has a seat in row 3, while MSNOW sits back in row 4 with Telemundo.

Once you get outside the White House, though, opinions on the AP ban vary. The editors of The Free Press called the ban “the latest way the second Trump administration has run roughshod over the free press.” Nevertheless, they also pointed out, “Trump is hardly the first president to have dealt with a hostile press corps. But most of his predecessors have taken their lumps and used the ample power of the bully pulpit to get their side of the story out to the American people. The ones that did use the government to spy on, arrest, or suppress their critics are not remembered kindly in history.”

Actually, establishment historians seem to think highly of Barack Obama, who was guilty as charged for most of those offenses cited by The Free Press.

On the other hand, our Mark Alexander observed way back in 2018 that the press was grossly biased against Trump. “Imagine, if you will, what the American political landscape would look like if our national mainstream media outlets were actually neutral in their reporting — conducting themselves as journalists rather than ranting political puppets,” Alexander wrote. “It would look much more like what our Founders intended — a nation where protecting Liberty and the Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s founding documents was chief among the concerns of our people.”

As Aaron Terr of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression argues, “Press credentials aren’t a reward for loyalty to the government. A free, even adversarial, press is a sign of our country’s strength. The public deserves to hear about its government from independent voices, not just its leader’s loyalists and allies.”

But what about our right to the truth? Lies of omission are just as bad as lies of commission, and there is good news coming out of this government, as we detail regularly. Thomas Jefferson once opined that newspapers “serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.” Today, many of them just provide a smoke screen to obscure what they don’t believe the public should know, particularly if it’s perceived to benefit Republicans.

Is Donald Trump wrong to blackball these news outlets? Perhaps. But it makes a point that we should get fair reporting, whether it benefits the president or not. That fairness has been sorely lacking for most of the last decade, and if those three outlets don’t want to play ball, let’s find some that do. Besides, Trump was right in 2018: “The Fake News Media,” he said, is “the true Enemy of the People.”