President Donald Trump’s bans on critical news outlets are leaving Americans with something closer to “government propaganda,” a press freedom advocate warned Monday as a new lawsuit challenges his administration’s media restrictions.
The lawsuit seeks a broader court order against the restrictions, arguing that they harm the public as well as the journalists being excluded, The Washington Post reported.
“The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “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 institute and a Yale Law School clinic filed the action in federal court in Manhattan on behalf of six people, including professors, journalists, a student newspaper editor and a teacher. David Schulz, who directs the Yale clinic, said the president’s policy of “expelling disfavored journalists harms the public and our democracy.”
CNN, MS NOW and Politico have already won a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee, that restored their access to White House press facilities. CNN remains barred from traveling aboard Air Force One, prompting the outlets’ lawyer to threaten further legal action.
The fight over access has kept escalating. Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, called the removal of The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg from print-pool duty “retaliation” after his heated exchange with Trump.
The White House also threatened Politico with additional restrictions if it did not retract articles about Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Politico pushed back but made a substantial correction to one of the articles, the Post reported. And in a lengthy Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump said he is considering moving the press corps out of the White House complex.
“Media that pedal [sic] misinformation and defamation are completely capable of reporting their manufactured stories from directly outside,” a White House spokesperson told the Post when asked about the lawsuit.