When President Trump returned to the Oval Office last year, he adopted a policy of restricting the access of White House journalists whose reporting he says is “false” or “fake.” He expelled the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” He kicked out CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House altogether. Last week he restricted the access of a journalist from The Independent who asked unwelcome questions at a press briefing in the Oval Office. 

Trump is purging the White House press corps of journalists who don’t reliably describe the world in his terms. He’s not pretending the policy is anything other than what it is. He calls the policy a “ban on the free press.”

Today the Knight Institute and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School filed a new lawsuit arguing that the policy is unconstitutional. Our complaint argues that the spaces the government has opened to White House journalists are a “public forum” under the First Amendment, and that Trump’s policy is unconstitutional because it restricts journalists’ access to this forum based on viewpoint. 

Some of the media companies whose access has been restricted have sued, too, and their cases are making their way through the federal courts in D.C. We’ve supported those news organizations in a series of amicus briefs—see here, here, here, here, and here.

But the lawsuit we filed today differs in important ways from the ones the media companies have filed. 

For one thing, we’re suing not on behalf of news organizations but on behalf of their readers and listeners. The plaintiffs are a human rights advocate, a media watchdog, a historian, a civics teacher, a legal journalist, and a student journalist—all people who rely on White House journalists for insight and information about the government. Their lawsuit focuses on the implications of Trump’s policy for the public and for our democracy. 

Equally important, we’re asking the court not just to restore individual news organizations’ access but to declare Trump’s policy unconstitutional and prohibit the president and his aides from enforcing it against White House reporters in the future. The court needs to do this, we argue, in order to protect journalists’ independence and ensure that the public has access to undistorted reporting about the president.
 
We’re grateful to our clients for their willingness to fight for the public’s right to independent journalism. We asked each of them to explain why they thought it was important to file this case. You can read their responses here.