“The White House press pool is an institution that has long benefited presidents and press alike. By providing journalists direct access to observe and question the president, the press pool enables independent reporting that facilitates free discussion of governmental affairs,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight Institute. “This case is not just about the AP’s First Amendment rights. It’s also about the ability of the American public to receive information about the president, free from government censorship.”

Today’s brief argues that by having created the press pool to enable access to the president in limited-space contexts ranging from the Oval Office to foreign travel, the White House has established a forum from which it may not constitutionally exclude a news organization on the basis of viewpoint–which is what the White House is doing by its own admission. It urges the court to reinstate the AP to the press pool as soon as possible.

In March, the Institute filed an amicus brief in the case urging the trial court to find that the press pool is a public forum. The Institute filed a second brief in the trial court on behalf of 12 prominent constitutional scholars, explaining how the history of the nation’s founding era supports the principle that the First Amendment prohibits the government from discriminating against press coverage based on viewpoint. 

“Banning the AP from the press pool is part of the Trump administration’s lawless attack on press freedom and the First Amendment,” said Jake Karr, staff attorney at the Knight Institute. “The court should reinstate the AP and categorically reject the administration’s unconstitutional effort to control the news and the American public’s understanding of this president and his policies.”

Read today’s amicus brief here.

Read more about the case here.

Lawyers on the case include Katie Fallow, Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, Jake Karr, and legal fellow Kiran Wattamwar for the Knight First Amendment Institute.

The following can be attributed to Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:

“We’re disappointed that the D.C. Circuit has refused to reconsider its earlier stay decision, which effectively allows the White House to continue banning reporters from the press pool in retaliation for their reporting. The effect of this troubling precedent was demonstrated just yesterday when the White House expelled the Wall Street Journal from an overseas trip press pool in retaliation for its reporting on a letter allegedly tying the president to Jeffrey Epstein. These kinds of viewpoint-based exclusions undermine press freedom as well as the public’s access to reliable information about the president and his policies.”

The Knight Institute filed an amicus brief in the case in March, arguing that the press pool is an expressive forum from which the government cannot constitutionally exclude news organizations based on their viewpoints. The brief also argued that allowing the ban to stand would chill speech by other members of the White House press pool. 

The Institute made a similar argument during President Trump’s first term in challenging Trump’s practice of blocking critics from his social media accounts. Read more about that case here.

Read today’s decision here.

Read more about the case here.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, adriana.lamirande@knightcolumbia.org 

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed two amicus briefs in the case. The first argued that the decision to ban the AP from participating in the press pool violates the First Amendment because it is based on viewpoint. The second brief was filed on behalf of legal scholars and addressed the historical pedigree of the rule against viewpoint discrimination. The court’s opinion generally tracked the theory proposed in the first brief, and expressly cited the second brief.

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:

“This is a careful, well-reasoned opinion that properly describes the exclusion of the Associated Press from the press pool as retaliatory, viewpoint-based, and unconstitutional. As the Court says, the First Amendment bars the White House from excluding news organizations from the press pool based on their editorial judgments.”

The following can be attributed to Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:

“This is an important decision. The First Amendment means the White House can’t ban news outlets from covering the president simply because they don’t parrot his preferred language.” 

Read today’s decision here.

Read more about the case here.

“The White House explicitly banned the AP from participating in the press pool based on the administration’s disapproval of the news outlet’s editorial decisions,” said Katie Fallow, the Knight Institute’s deputy litigation director. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly confirmed that the government can’t deny Americans a source of information simply because it doesn't like what it has to say. This fundamental principle stretches back to the earliest understanding of the First Amendment.” 

Today’s brief argues that historical evidence from early American history about the meaning of the First Amendment supports “the two central First Amendment principles raised by this case: the principle that the government should not be permitted to restrict speech based on viewpoint, and the principle that the access by the press to report on the government serves a critical role in providing citizens with the political information they need to govern themselves.” The brief goes on to discuss debates among 18th and 19th century lawmakers reflecting these central principles.

“One of the animating principles of the First Amendment since its ratification has been that the government may not control the flow of information to the public by punishing members of the press when they report the news in a manner it dislikes,” said Professor Genevieve Lakier from the University of Chicago Law School. “It is the people, and the press as their agents, who are supposed to decide what news is fit to print. The government’s exclusion of the AP violates that core principle.”

Read today’s amicus brief here.

Earlier this month, the Knight First Amendment Institute filed another amicus brief in the case, urging the court to restore AP to the press pool. There it argued that the press pool is an expressive forum from which the government can’t constitutionally exclude news organizations based on their viewpoints. Read that brief here.

Read more about the case here.

A hearing on the AP’s request to preliminarily enjoin the White House’s ban is scheduled for tomorrow, March 27, 2025, at 9:30 a.m. ET before Judge Trevor N. McFadden.

The Knight Institute filed today’s brief on behalf of Genevieve Lakier (University of Chicago Law School); RonNell Anderson Jones (University of Utah College of Law); Jack M. Balkin (Yale Law School); Erin Carroll (Georgetown Law); Erwin Chemerinsky (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law); Heidi Kitrosser (Northwestern, Pritzker School of Law); Christina Koningisor (UC Law San Francisco); Michael W. McConnell (Stanford Law School); Robert Post (Yale Law School); Jacob M. Schriner-Briggs (Chicago-Kent College of Law); Geoffrey R. Stone (University of Chicago Law School); and Sonja R. West (University of Georgia School of Law).

Lawyers on the case include Fallow, Jameel Jaffer, and Alex Abdo for the Knight First Amendment Institute.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, adriana.lamirande@knightcolumbia.org 

“The First Amendment bars the White House from excluding news organizations from the press pool based on their editorial judgments,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “The court should reinstate AP and categorically reject the administration’s unconstitutional effort to control the news.”

The Knight Institute’s brief argues that the press pool is an expressive forum from which the government can’t constitutionally exclude news organizations based on their viewpoints. The Institute made a similar argument during President Trump’s first term in challenging Trump’s practice of blocking critics from his social media accounts. The courts sided with the Institute in that case, holding that Trump had violated the First Amendment and forcing him to restore the critics he’d excluded. More about that case here.

“The White House’s moves to ban the AP from the press pool based on its editorial decisions is part of this president’s broader attack on the press and free speech, as it attempts to bully media organizations into coverage that only benefits the president,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight Institute. “Public discourse and self-governance stand to lose the most from these attacks, because the public relies on the press for timely and unbiased information about the president and his policies.”

Read today’s amicus brief here. 

Read more about the case here.

Lawyers on the case include Jaffer, Katie Fallow, Alex Abdo, and Eric Columbus for the Knight First Amendment Institute.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, adriana.lamirande@knightcolumbia.org 

The press pool is a small group of journalists who cover the president on behalf of the larger press corps, and ultimately on behalf of the public. For more than a century, the pool has been the public’s eyes and ears in situations where broader access is not possible—for example, when the president speaks to the press in the Oval Office or when he is traveling abroad. Poolers were present when President Franklin Roosevelt died. They were present at the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the shooting of President Ronald Reagan. They were with President George W. Bush when he learned about the September 11, 2001, attacks.

For at least four decades, the membership of the press pool has been decided by the press itself, through the White House Correspondents Association. A few weeks ago, though, Trump’s press secretary informed the AP that it would no longer be admitted to the Oval Office unless it revised its style guide to reflect Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Later the White House barred AP from Air Force One, and then from other spaces as well, complaining that AP had “weaponized” its style guide by refusing to adopt the president’s preferred language.

Of course, the real fight here isn’t about what things should be called, but about who decides. Who should decide how the press describes the world? Trump’s answer is “Trump”—but this is absurd and intolerable. Today Trump demands that the AP rename the Gulf of Mexico, but tomorrow he will demand that Ukraine be called Russia, that immigrants be called terrorists, and that the 2020 election be called a fraud. Plainly, the free press can’t cede to the White House the right to decide how reality should be described. A press that ceded that right would not be free, or serving the public, or worth defending.

If the courts apply the law faithfully, AP will prevail in this dispute. The organization I direct, the Knight First Amendment Institute, filed a legal brief last week pointing out that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has long been understood to prohibit exactly the kind of retaliatory action the White House engaged in here. In the terminology of the First Amendment, the press pool is a “public forum,” and AP’s exclusion from it is impermissible discrimination on the basis of viewpoint.

But the fight over the press pool is just one facet of a broader campaign by the White House to control the information that Americans receive about their government. For years, Trump has used frivolous civil suits to subdue news organizations whose coverage he dislikes—suing ABC News for suggesting that a jury had found him guilty of rape rather than sexual assault; suing CBS News for making unremarkable edits to an interview with Kamala Harris; suing the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll that suggested that Trump would lose the election. Now the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission has launched an array of investigations plainly meant to give Trump additional leverage in disputes about news coverage. Meanwhile, a major Trump donor is asking the Supreme Court to expand the circumstances in which public officials can prevail in defamation actions against the media.

And this campaign against press freedom is accompanied by a ruthless crackdown on dissent. Trump has issued two orders sanctioning law firms that he views as political enemies. His administration is arresting and threatening to deport foreign students for lawful speech. The State Department announced that it would use new artificial intelligence tools to revoke visas of immigrants determined to be “pro-Hamas”—a phrase that Trump administration officials use to characterize last year’s overwhelmingly peaceful protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

In recent years, American courts have sometimes come under criticism for unreflectively extending robust First Amendment protection even to commercial speech, data transfers, and campaign finance donations. But some of the Trump administration’s recent actions are assaults on the very heart of the First Amendment—on the right of citizens to associate freely and to criticize public officials, and on the right of the press to report the news. The AP case supplies the courts with an opportunity to make clear that they will defend these core political rights. A decisive response from the courts to Trump’s assault on the First Amendment is no guarantee that American democracy will survive Trump, but without one we are lost.