President Donald Trump announced on Friday that the White House would be banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — and it left CNN's media analyst Brian Stelter scrambling to assess the situation.
"Well this is unusual, isn't it?" Stelter told anchor Brianna Keilar.
Stelter added that he is curious "what did CNN and MS NOW and Politico write that might have made the president so upset? And there is no specific answer in his post. There is no indication in that post." However, "there is no indication that the administration is taking any steps to actually follow through on his threat. So even though the threat is quite serious and would have real implications for the First Amendment and for the press freedom in the United States right now ... the CNN staff remains there, working like a normal Friday afternoon."
Keilar noted that Trump has taken a number of potshots at CNN before, both publicly attacking them and trying to restrict their access to the government — to which Stelter concurred.
In the most notable case, he said, "right after the midterms in 2018, during Trump's first term in office, he was angry about a question from our former CNN colleague, Jim Acosta, who was working here at the network for many years." After Acosta infuriated him at a press conference, Trump "took steps to revoke Acosta's press pass, and some viewers might remember that actually provoked a legal battle where CNN reluctantly ... [had] to go to court to defend that White House correspondent's First Amendment rights."
Swiftly, a judge appointed by Trump himself ordered Acosta's press access reinstated, and he was back at work. And since then, Trump had largely not attempted to ban reporters or outlets altogether, noted Stelter.
"There was an attempt to ban the Associated Press from some White House events," he said, in retaliation for not accepting Trump's guidelines renaming the Gulf of Mexico, "but we have not seen the president actually announce that he's banned news outlets altogether. And in this situation, we're in a little bit of a vacuum because, as I said, there's no indication that he's actually followed through. So let's give it a couple hours, see what happens."