CNN, MS NOW and Politico are preparing to take legal action against the US government after the three news outlets were banned by President Donald Trump, while one of the president’s appointees tried to defend the restriction while many legal experts say they will prevail in court.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the press houses were not behaving as “good-faith journalists“.
“The president is absolutely within his rights to limit journalists to government facilities, particularly when, in his opinion, they’re not behaving as good-faith journalists. And that’s just not his opinion. That’s the Supreme Court’s opinion,” Waltz told anchor Dana Bash.
Waltz cited a 1965 Supreme Court ruling, Zemel v. Rusk, in which Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “the right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information”.
However, the current dispute centers on a First Amendment legal concept known as viewpoint discrimination, since Trump has been explicit about his reasons for wanting to ban certain outlets over coverage he deems “negative”.
Courts have forbidden viewpoint discrimination and protected the rights of journalists in case after case. A wide array of reporters have been welcomed onto the White House grounds for many decades, making Trump’s restrictions unprecedented. His own words are likely to be used against him in court.
“Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” he said in the Oval Office. “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine,” he said. “But I don’t have to let them into my, into the people’s house”.
“The First Amendment does not permit the government to pick and choose which journalists are allowed to do their jobs,” National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. said.
Essentially, courts have ruled that if the White House decides to let in some reporters, then it cannot block others for the reasons Trump has cited. When Trump briefly banned The Associated Press from some events previously, a Trump-appointed judge in Washington wrote that “when the White House opens its facilities to the press generally, as it does in the Brady Briefing Room, it cannot exclude journalists based on viewpoint”.