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Yet another Newsweek reader, Robyn T. Elliott, is furious with us. After President Donald Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, Elliott wrote that it was “shameful that you agree with the censoring of the fourth pillar of democracy,” adding that if Newsweek didn’t believe in press freedom, perhaps we should “rebrand as entertainment news.” Ouch.
Yet our article hadn’t agreed with Trump. We reported what he did, quoted his critics and defenders, and let readers judge via our Fairness Meter. Seventy-two percent said the article was fair, 9 percent left-leaning and 19 percent right-leaning. Still, Elliott’s email raises a question worth applying rather more widely. Trump’s attack on the press is easy to see. A correspondent arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and a guard says their badge no longer works. The president has made the reason clear, announcing that their employer is being excluded for its “FAKE NEWS” reporting.
Other presidents have preferred paperwork. President Barack Obama’s administration brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight alleged leakers of classified information, compared with three under all previous administrations combined, per the Committee to Protect Journalists. His Justice Department also secretly seized two months of records from more than 20 Associated Press phone lines used by more than 100 journalists.
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Trump’s first administration did the same. His Justice Department secretly obtained phone records for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times reporters while probing leaks. President Joe Biden’s prohibited compulsory demands for journalists’ records, with limited exceptions. Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed that in 2025, letting the government seek reporters’ records and testimony to identify leakers. This year, the department issued, then withdrew, subpoenas to Wall Street Journal, Post and Times journalists. But the White House ban is just the tip of the iceberg. The federal FOIA backlog grew from 115,080 requests in 2016 to 339,671 in 2025. Requests also surged, so the backlog cannot be pinned on one president. But it illustrates the point quite well. A confiscated badge makes good TV. A delayed FOIA request does not.
If press freedom is the principle, the test cannot be whether we like the president when they restrict it. George Washington detested newspaper attacks, Abraham Lincoln suppressed the press during the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt popularized “muckraker” to describe journalists and Richard Nixon called the press “the enemy.” That’s part of the deal. So is keeping the front door open for the Fourth Estate, and not putting up barriers round the back.
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