The press is the sentinel, not the enemy

I confess I spent portions of my own presidency in something close to fury at the newspapers. They printed falsehoods about me with a cheerfulness that would have embarrassed an honest scoundrel. And yet I never — not once — believed that the cure for a bad press was a silenced one. The press is not the servant of any administration; it is the servant of the citizen. The moment a president decides which reporters may witness the exercise of power, he has made himself, in that small but consequential measure, a censor.

According to CNBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Politico are now challenging a White House ban through a lawsuit alleging a violation of First Amendment rights. That is exactly the right response. When government shuts a door against scrutiny, the courts are precisely where a free people should push back. This is not a partisan observation — I would write the same sentence if the offending administration bore any other name.

The argument from the executive's side, one may infer, is that the president retains discretion over who enters his house. And there is a narrow truth in that. But the White House is not, in any meaningful sense, his house. It is the people's house, occupied on their sufferance and funded by their labor. The reporters who cover it are not guests requesting a social favor; they are agents of the public interest performing a constitutional function. To bar them for the offense of critical coverage is to punish the exercise of the very freedom the First Amendment was written to protect.

I wrote in 1787 — and I hold to it now — that were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. That sentiment was not naive romanticism; it was a considered judgment about the architecture of self-governance. A government that controls its own coverage has, to that degree, severed the feedback loop between the ruler and the ruled. Power without scrutiny does not grow more virtuous; it grows more comfortable in its vices.

The concentration of power to define who may speak about authority, and who may not, is precisely the kind of soft tyranny that republics must resist before it hardens. Today it is three outlets deemed unfriendly. Inference, not recollection, suggests that the circle of the excluded will not shrink on its own. It never has. The citizen who is indifferent because his preferred press is still admitted should recall that the precedent being set does not ask his permission before it is applied to the next administration's critics — who may well be him.

Let the lawsuit proceed. Let the courts speak. And let the citizen remember that a free press, however imperfect, however maddening, however wrong on any given Tuesday, is one of the few instruments that stands between the governed and a government that has forgotten it answers to them.