In the increasingly bitter legal standoff between President Donald Trump and media outlets whose reporting he dislikes, a new and crucial third party has emerged: citizens who watch and read the news and need it to do their jobs.
A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of six such citizens — essentially representing the wider public audience — argues that it's not only the rights of news organizations that are violated when Trump bans them from White House premises. Even more fundamentally, the lawsuit argues, such bans violate the public's right to independent reporting about its president and government.
“The ultimate injury here … is to the democratic public,” says the suit, filed in federal district court in New York against Trump and three key aides, including the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
“The First Amendment protects the public’s right to know what its government is doing,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, along with the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.
“The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting," Fallow said in a statement. "When the White House expels reporters because of their coverage and threatens others with expulsion, it isn’t just the press that suffers — the public loses access to independent reporting and gets something closer to government propaganda.”
The Trump administration, asked for comment on the lawsuit, responded in a statement that it attributed to an unidentified White House official: “No person may demand access to the Oval Office.” It said media that peddle “misinformation and defamation are completely capable of reporting their manufactured stories from directly outside.”
The plaintiffs all rely on White House news for their work
The six plaintiffs are all people who say they rely on independent and diverse White House reporting for their teaching, journalism or advocacy. They include a noted human rights advocate, a political journalist, a Yale history professor, a high school civics teacher, a legal journalist, and a student journalist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The complaint filed Monday recounts how various news organizations that have been targeted by Trump are already battling the administration in the courts. These cases include the current lawsuit by CNN, MS NOW and Politico, whose journalists were banished from the White House in September.
A federal judge recently extended an order preventing the White House from enforcing the ban while the case makes its way through the legal system. Still affected, though, is CNN’s pool coverage of Trump. The White House has been denying the network its usual slots in the video pool covering the president’s activities and travel, and CNN has threatened further action.
Also continuing is the legal case involving The Associated Press, whose reporters were barred last year from the Oval Office, Air Force One and some events in retaliation for the outlet's decision not to follow Trump's lead in changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, which lies partially in Mexican and other waters, to the Gulf of America.
The New York Times is also involved in litigation, over a Pentagon policy requiring escorts for journalists on its grounds. And ABC is fighting back against the Trump administration in a dispute over renewal of its broadcast licenses.
This lawsuit seeks more wide-ranging relief
The new lawsuit filed Monday, though, is different from previous legal action against the president — first, in that the plaintiffs are ordinary citizens, shifting the focus from news gatherers to news consumers, and thus implying a much larger pool of stakeholders.
The lawsuit reframes the current debate over White House access in at least one key way. The public right to receive information is part of established law, said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight Institute. However, nobody has yet asserted this right in relation to the White House press corps and the issues currently at stake.
“We wanted to put the injury to the public at the center of the conversation,” Jaffer said.
“It’s one thing for CNN to say, ‘We are here because the public needs us,’” he said. “It’s another for a member of the public to say that interference with the White House press corps undermines our right to information about the government.”
In addition, the litigation seeks more wide-ranging relief.
The suit, which names Trump as defendant along with Wiles, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung and Secret Service Director Sean M. Curran, calls not merely for reinstatement of access that has already been impacted, but for a broad injunction that would protect from retaliation every news outlet that covers the White House —- now, and in the future.
“Defendants' policy of restricting the access of disfavored news organizations deprives the public of the reporting of those organizations," the complaint says. It also "inevitably deprives them of the independent reporting of other news organizations as well, since every journalist who reports from the White House must now account for the possibility that a critical or ill-advised word about the president may result in their access being summarily restricted or revoked."
“Plaintiffs ... seek a declaration that the policy is unconstitutional because it imposes restrictions on a limited public forum that are viewpoint-based and unreasonable," the complaint adds. "They also seek an injunction barring defendants from enforcing the policy.”
Plaintiffs include a human rights advocate, a high school teacher and a student journalist
Plaintiff Ethan Young, a student at the University of Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian, said in an interview that White House reporting has become increasingly important at his college newspaper during Trump’s second term.
“Over the last two years we’ve seen college campuses be a key avenue where President Trump’s policies have really affected people across the country, and Penn’s campus is no stranger to that,” he said.
“So I use White House reporting almost daily to look at what’s happening in both national higher education trends, but also just general federal policy changes, to see what might impact Penn,” Young said. “You never know what policy could have an impact on the Penn student body.”
Especially important to Young and his colleagues at the paper is a diversity of news outlets to choose from.
“We are not in the room. We are not in Washington,” Young said. “The benefit of having access to a variety of publications ... means I am constantly seeing different questions being asked of White House officials.”
And more often than not, he said, that means he’ll get the answer to a question he has, too.
The other plaintiffs are:
— Kenneth Roth, former longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch and a lecturer at Yale’s law school and school of global affairs.
— Daniel Froomkin, media and political journalist and editor of Press Watch, a nonprofit that encourages political journalists to “fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable.”
— Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor at Yale University.
— Peter Schmidt-Nowara, a social studies and civics teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School in New York.
— Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.