President Trump has banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds.

I want to do today what journalism used to do, which is explain the story instead of telling you what to think about it.

That's the problem with most coverage today. You get about two seconds to decide which side you're on, and all you're handed is the superficial identity of the person and which party he belongs to.

In this case, the media hopes you take whatever negative feelings they have instilled in you about Donald Trump and conclude that he's shredding the First Amendment.

You can conclude that if you want. Just make sure you arrive there based upon what actually happened and not some fabricated, ambiguous narrative.

On Friday, the President posted that he was banning all three outlets "as a result of their constant 'reporting' FAKE NEWS!" He said the frustration had built up over two years and that no single story put the ban into motion.

On Saturday the White House enforced it. Betsy Klein of CNN, Akayla Gardner of MS NOW and Cheyenne Haslett of Politico showed up for work and were turned away. Their badges had been switched off.

Without those credentials, they can't use the White House working space, attend the briefings, or cover the restricted events that come with the pass.

So let’s take a look at this in full context.

It's obviously unacceptable if a president seeks to remove journalists who are simply trying to get answers to tough questions and get information out to the American people.

That would be an attempt to silence the press and, by extension, keep information hidden from the American people.

A free press is critically important in a free society. That's why this concept is enumerated in the First Amendment.

But is this what Donald Trump is doing? Is he trying to keep things hidden from the American people? Is he punishing media outlets for holding him accountable?

Is he keeping these three outlets off the grounds in order to stop negative news about his presidency?

I'd say the obvious answer is no.

The evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC ran 92 percent negative coverage of this President through the first months of his second term, according to the Media Research Center.

If Trump wanted to stop all negative news about his presidency, he certainly would have booted those folks as well. And probably a lot of others.

Every other outlet in that room is going to ask him about taking away the credentials from these news organizations. All of that is absolutely fair. No one is going to give him a free pass on this.

But the truth is, nobody took away anyone's right to report. Nobody told them they can't dig or share whatever they find with their audience. Nobody told them what stories to write or what they could publish.

They simply lost a seat in that room.

You have a right as a journalist to report on whatever you want. You don't have a right to a seat in that room.

If I drove to Washington, D.C. today and showed up without credentials, I wouldn't get in. Neither would your local NBC, ABC or CBS affiliate.

That room holds only so many people. Every journalist in America cannot be there, so somebody has to decide who gets in. This has always been the case.

The real question is what happens when the people holding those seats engage in behavior that isn't journalistic at all.

It's wrong for a president to seek to keep journalists from asking him tough questions and reporting negatively on his administration's policies. It's also true that people engaged in creating false narratives instead of providing real journalism shouldn't get an automatic pass either.

The purpose of journalism is to give people information. Information that is as objectively true and straightforward as a journalist can make it.

The problem is, most of the people who call themselves journalists today are not engaging in true reporting. Instead, they're trying to create a narrative that helps advance their political interests, which include the election of Democrats and the defeat of Republicans.

The outlets whose reporters were kicked out of that room have demonstrated some very concerning behavior, to say the least.

In January of 2025, a Florida jury found CNN liable for defaming Navy veteran Zachary Young by tying his Afghanistan evacuation work to a "black market." The jury hit CNN with $5 million in compensatory damages, and CNN settled before punitive damages were decided.

NBCUniversal settled with Dr. Mahendra Amin, the Georgia gynecologist MSNBC personalities had tied to "mass hysterectomies" of women detained by ICE. A federal judge found no evidence of any such thing.

That same January, two former Politico reporters, Marc Caputo and Tara Palmeri, said editors there buried or slowed down damaging Biden family stories. Caputo says he was told not to write, talk or tweet about the Hunter Biden laptop. Politico disputes their accounts.

Those are just the examples that are demonstrably problematic. The soft bias and the obvious slant in their daily reporting runs a whole lot deeper.

Real journalism is when a reporter stays out of the story. We're all human, and none of us are completely objective. But a journalist should do everything within his power to remain as objective as possible.

Journalism is supposed to give us information so we can make informed decisions and draw our own conclusions.

I'm not a journalist. I'm a guy with an opinion who editorializes the news, and I tell you that up front. The people in that briefing room aren't supposed to be doing that. But far too many of them are.

Today, all three outlets said they are suing. They'll point to a 1977 court ruling that found pulling a White House pass over the content of someone's reporting violates the First Amendment, and they'll point to President Trump's own words about why he did it.

I understand the tension here. A president trying to silence the press would be dangerous. But a press that uses its access to build narratives and shape public opinion under the guise of journalism is dangerous, too.

Both of those things can be true at the same time, my friends.

And we need to defend against both.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

RedState — Ward Clark on the President's announcement, and how he doubled down on it.

RedState — Becca Lower on Politico's reporter getting turned away Saturday, and the two outlets the President hinted could be next.

The Associated Press — The President's own announcement, FAKE NEWS in capital letters, along with the AP's own access fight that is still in court.

NPR — What happened Saturday when the three reporters showed up and found their badges switched off.

CNN — The three outlets say they're suing, and the 1977 case they're leaning on.

PJ Media — Matt Margolis on Barack Obama's own record with the press, which is where the second article below starts.

Mediaite — Marc Caputo and Tara Palmeri on the Biden stories they say Politico's editors sat on.

Fox News — CNN rewriting its own fact-check after calling the President's claim about transgender experiments on mice false.

Fox News — The Media Research Center study behind that 92 percent number.

Barack Obama weighed in on all of this over the weekend at Colgate University.

"I'm trying to think what would have happened if I had said, you know what, Fox News, you're out of here," he said. "It's unimaginable." The audience applauded.

He went on to say that if 30 to 35 percent of the country thinks this is okay, then we haven't developed an understanding of what democracy requires, and we need to reestablish that.

He's free to have that opinion and to share it. I just think context matters — and his own record doesn't require much imagination.

In October of 2009, his administration tried to keep Fox News out of a pool interview with Treasury's pay czar, Ken Feinberg. It backed off only after the other networks refused to do the interview without Fox.

In 2013 it came out that his Justice Department had secretly seized phone records for more than twenty lines used by Associated Press reporters and editors. The AP's own president called it a massive and unprecedented intrusion.

That same Justice Department went after Fox News reporter James Rosen's phone records and emails. An FBI agent's sworn affidavit described him as "an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator." He was never charged with anything. What he had done was simply report the news.

New York Times reporter James Risen spent years fighting a subpoena that Obama's Justice Department kept pressing, demanding he testify about a confidential source.

And in 2013, after Bob Woodward reported that the sequester cuts started in Obama's own White House, a senior official emailed him that he would "regret staking out that claim." Woodward made that threat public.

Matt Margolis at PJ Media laid a lot of this out over the weekend, and it's worth reading in full.

All of this context is relevant to the larger discussion about freedom of the press and the power of the executive branch to decide which outlets get access to the White House press corps.

You might think President Trump is well within his authority to remove these outlets, or you may think he got this one wrong.

But if we want to maintain our intellectual integrity, we have to admit it's a bit ironic to hear Obama say he can't imagine these things happening, when his own record includes things significantly more serious than pulling three badges.

The press mostly gave Obama a pass. And that's a much more dangerous scenario than anything we've seen from the Trump administration with this move.

In this clip I talk about how most coverage today isn't built to inform you. It's built to walk you to a conclusion somebody already picked out for you.

Give it a watch and leave a comment. I'd like to know if you've noticed the same thing.

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