The press is not the enemy of the office — ignorance is

CNBC reports that District Judge Tim Kelly ordered the White House to immediately restore access for three news outlets whose credentials the president had revoked on September 18. The ruling came after the ban had already stood long enough to make the administration's intent plain. A judge then had to remind the executive of what a free government requires. That is not a triumph — it is a warning.

I speak here not as a partisan of any publication, for I had my own quarrels with the press in my time. What I affirm is the principle beneath the quarrel. A government that controls which voices may witness its conduct has taken the first step toward controlling what the citizenry is permitted to know. That step, once normalized, is not easily walked back.

The office of the presidency is a public trust, not a private estate. The citizens who confer that trust are owed a full accounting of how it is exercised. Reporters — however disagreeable their questions, however inconvenient their scrutiny — are the practical instrument by which the public exercises that oversight. To bar them is not to wound the press; it is to wound the people.

I am told, as the reports have it, that a judge of the federal bench acted swiftly to correct this. That the courts held is cause for measured relief. But I counsel against mistaking the remedy for a vindication of the system's health. A republic that requires constant judicial rescue from its own executive is a republic burning through its reserves of institutional trust. Those reserves are not unlimited.

The precedent set here — that the executive may attempt exclusion, that outlets must litigate their way back into a public building, that the process itself becomes the punishment — is precisely the kind of habit that corrodes free government gradually and then all at once. I cannot speak to the specifics of modern media or the mechanics of credentialing; those are beyond my direct knowledge. But I can speak to what faction does when it gains control of information: it uses that control to entrench itself and to make accountability feel like an act of aggression.

My counsel is this: the citizens of the Republic should regard any attempt to restrict press access to public officials — by any administration, of any party — not as a political maneuver to be cheered or jeered according to one's loyalties, but as an institutional injury to be resisted on principle. The judge ruled correctly. The next question is whether the lesson holds, or whether the attempt is merely deferred.