NEW YORK—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School (MFIA) today filed a lawsuit in federal district court in New York challenging the Trump administration’s policy of restricting or revoking the access of White House journalists whose reporting the president says is “false” or “fake.” 

Filed on behalf of individual citizens who rely on White House reporting in their teaching, scholarship, journalism, and advocacy, the lawsuit argues that the spaces the government has opened to White House journalists are a “public forum” under the First Amendment. It also argues that the White House’s policy—which the president has described as a “ban on the free press”—unconstitutionally deprives the plaintiffs and the public at large of those journalists’ independent reporting.

“The First Amendment protects the public’s right to know what its government is doing. The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “When the White House expels reporters because of their coverage and threatens others with expulsion, it isn’t just the press that suffers—the public loses access to independent reporting and gets something closer to government propaganda.”

David A. Schulz, director of Yale Law School’s MFIA and co-counsel in the case, added: “As the Supreme Court has emphasized repeatedly, journalists are the public's ‘eyes and ears’ in spaces they can't access. The president's policy of expelling disfavored journalists harms the public and our democracy.”  

Some of the media organizations that have been targeted under the policy have sued, seeking restoration of their access. The lawsuit filed today differs from those other lawsuits both because it is filed on behalf of ordinary citizens rather than media organizations, and because it seeks broader relief—not just reinstatement of individual media organizations’ access but a broad injunction that would protect the entire White House press corps from the threat of retaliation and protect the public’s access to independent reporting about the president and his policies. 

“The First Amendment reflects a recognition that democracy requires an informed public, and that an informed public requires an independent press,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “The president’s attack on the independence of the White House press corps should be understood in that light. It’s an attack on the foundations of our democracy.”

The plaintiffs in the case are:

  • Kenneth Roth, a human rights advocate, legal scholar, and lecturer at Yale Law School and the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.

  • Daniel Froomkin, a media and political journalist and editor of Press Watch and Heads Up News.

  • Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and professor at Yale University.

  • Peter Schmidt-Nowara, a civics and social studies teacher at a New York City high school.

  • Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

  • Ethan Young, a student at the University of Pennsylvania and editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Read statements from the plaintiffs here. 

Read today’s complaint here.

Read more about the case, Roth v. Trump, here.

Today’s lawsuit follows legal challenges brought by the news organizations themselves. On October 13, in a case brought by CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the White House from barring those three outlets from White House press facilities. The Knight Institute supported the news organizations in that case, joining the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and more than 75 media organizations in an amicus brief. The Institute has also filed three amicus briefs supporting the Associated Press in its challenge to its exclusion from the White House press pool, and it has supported The New York Times in its challenge to restrictions on press access at the Pentagon. 

Lawyers on the case include Katie Fallow, Jameel Jaffer, Jake Karr, Nicola Morrow, and Taylor Fox of the Knight First Amendment Institute, and David A. Schulz and Christina Lee of the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

For more information, contact: Lorraine Kenny, [email protected].