Media under Trump: Quit whining and crying, do your job 

The Trump administration wasted little time in shaking up the long-accepted practices of the White House press corps.  

President Trump barred one of the world’s largest news organizations, the Associated Press, from access to White House functions and Air Force One. It seems there are some nits to pick regarding what the body of water west of Florida should be called. Then the administration’s press office wrested control of the traditional press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association.

The press desks also got rearranged at the Pentagon, with high-profile outlets such as the Washington Post and CNN losing their workspaces in favor of more Trump-friendly outlets such as Newsmax.

Predictably, the journalism industry went into a frenzy over the changes, jumping on their free press high horses to claim the White House is diminishing the First Amendment. The AP has sued Trump administration officials, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt and chief of staff Susie Wiles, seeking to have its access restored. WHCA President Eugene Daniels issued a blistering public statement, which said, “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”  

Another statement of protest came jointly from the editors of Reuters, the AP and Bloomberg News, saying the White House move “harms the spread of reliable information.” Journalism rights organization Reporters Without Borders also weighed in, stating, “No politician should get to decide which journalists get to cover them … but President Trump keeps opening new fronts in his war on the press.” 

The news industry is quite right that Trump is treating the press with hostility, even if the antagonism was to be expected, given Trump’s long-running battle with journalists. And the AP has a solid point that it should be allowed to refer to the “Gulf of Whatever” as it sees fit. The issue here is not whether Trump is justified in his anti-press machinations, but rather what the press can do about it.  

Guidance on the government-press relationship can be found in a seminal address delivered by former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1974 to Yale Law School. Stewart’s address came in the aftermath of the Nixon administration, which certainly had its own running battle with the media. Press rights were very much a matter of debate at that time, with the Supreme Court having recently made several key First Amendment decisions on topics including libel, confidential news sources, and the publication of stolen government documents. 

Stewart bluntly stated that the journalism industry should expect no help from the government in carrying out its free press duties. “The press is free to do battle against secrecy and deception in government,” he said. “But the press cannot expect from the Constitution any guarantee that it will succeed.”

Stewart staunchly defended the importance of a free press, even as he scolded some newspapers and television news outlets for at times being “outrageously abusive, untruthful, arrogant, and hypocritical.”

He wrapped up his analysis by stating there is no constitutional right for the press to access the government bureaucracy, concluding, “The Constitution, in other words, establishes the contest, not its resolution.”

It would behoove the media industry to reflect on Stewart’s perspectives before it goes too far down the path of self-righteous entitlement. Claiming any media outlet has a right to be in the press pool or on Air Force One, or to have a desk in the Pentagon, would likely have been a non-starter for the high court of his day. Such claims of access rights might well fall on deaf ears at today’s Supreme Court, too. All sitting justices, particularly Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have probably been rereading the Stewart speech. 

Despite the Trump administration’s heavy-handed treatment of press-White House protocols and traditions, the president has actually made it rather easy to cover him. Trump is quite the open book. The press and the public can know minute-to-minute what is on his mind, thanks to his posting constantly on social media and answering questions from the press on an almost daily basis. Trump even allowed the press, with its television cameras, to witness an intense diplomatic debate with the president of Ukraine.

As the news industry engages this contest for press freedom, it should keep in mind that public sentiment is not necessarily on its side. Americans’ trust in the news media continues its steady decline, as evidenced in Gallup’s most recent polling that showed only 31 percent trust the media “a great deal or a fair amount.” Perhaps even more shocking, a new YouGov survey shows more Americans trust the Trump administration than the media to “state the facts fully, accurately, and fairly.” 

Shoring up press credibility would be the best way for the media to make points in the “contest” described by Justice Stewart. Whining about press access in front of an unsympathetic citizenry comes off as small ball in a contest that is too important for the press to lose. 

Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant.