CNN sues the White House to preserve unfettered press

CNN’s lawsuit against the Trump administration has broader implications than just the restoration of press credentials for the cable network’s White House correspondent.

If President Donald J. Trump is able to maintain the ban on journalist Jim Acosta, he will be emboldened to deny access to other reporters he perceives as the enemy.

With such a threat hanging over the heads of the press corps, the president will come one step closer to emulating his dictator pals around the world.

Trump has long railed against negative press coverage and has gone so far as to suggest that the nation’s libel laws should be changed to make it easier for public officials to sue reporters.

His attacks on the White House press corps have become a key part of his speeches at his campaign-style rallies around the country.

Reporters are corralled at the back of convention halls, and the president will point to them as he repeats his ridiculous claims that they are the “enemy of the people” and purveyors of “fake news.” While he does not directly urge his supporters to do bodily harm to the reporters, the language that he uses and his tone of voice are designed to incite.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Acosta, whose hard-hitting coverage of the Trump administration has made him a target of the president’s rabid supporters, was unceremoniously banned from the White House.

Last week, the administration suspended the CNN correspondent’s press pass, known as a Secret Service “hard pass.”

The action brings to mind the iron-fisted control of the press by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and China’s dictator Xi Jinping.

At one time or another, President Trump has sung the praises of all three.

Acosta’s ban from the White House comes at a time when another of Trump’s dictatorial pals, members of the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia, are being implicated in the murder of journalist Anand Khashoggi, who was a columnist for the Washington Post.

Royal family critic

Khashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to get documents so he could marry a Turkish national. He never left the building, and there are now reports that a team of assassins traveled from Saudi Arabia to Turkey to get rid of the critic of the royal family, especially Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud, a friend of President Trump’s and of members of his administration.

The CNN lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington is seeking a preliminary injunction so Acosta can return to the White House right away.

The cable network also wants a ruling from the court to prevent the White House from revoking Acosta’s press pass in the future.

The basic argument made by CNN is one that all democracy-loving Americans should embrace: The revocation of Acosta’s credentials violates the network’s and the reporter’s freedom of the press and due process rights.

The White House Correspondents’ Association said it “strongly supports CNN’s goal of seeing their correspondent regain a US Secret Service security credential that the White Hose should not have taken away in the first place.”

What was the White House’s justification for Acosta’s being banned from the White House? Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed – falsely, it has been shown – that he placed his hands on a White House intern who was trying to take a microphone away from him during a news conference a day after the Nov. 6 general election.

The news conference was aired live and was recorded. It now turns out that the clip Sanders made public to justify Acosta’s ban had been distorted and does not show the complete back-and-forth between the reporter and the president.

Rather than any kind of physical altercation, Acosta merely held on to the microphone and said to the intern, “Pardon me, ma’am,” and then went on to ask his next question to Trump. He then gave up the mic.

It is clear that the White House was simply looking for an excuse to stomp on an aggressive journalist.

There is legal precedent that says journalists have a First Amendment right to access to places closed to the public but open generally to the press, says Jonathan Peters, media law professor at the University of Georgia.

“In those places, if access is generally inclusive of the press, then access can’t be denied arbitrarily or absent compelling reasons. And the reasons that the White House gave were wholly unconvincing and uncompelling,” Peters said.

The CNN lawsuit is timely and necessary. Trump must be challenged.