When announcing on social media that he was revoking the reporters' White House credentials, the president said news outlets "shouldn't be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they're covering the President of the United States."
CNN, MS Now and Politico's federal lawsuit calls that a "direct assault on the First Amendment."
Tim Graham of the Media Research Center says this is almost a carbon copy of a lawsuit CNN and Jim Acosta filed against Trump in 2018.
In CNN v. Trump, filed after the White House revoked the correspondent's press credentials, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to temporarily restore Acosta's press pass. He based the order on the likelihood that Acosta and CNN would prevail on their due-process claim; he did not rule on their First Amendment claim at that stage.
"Apparently, the judge assigned to the case is the same judge that dismissed the Acosta case, so, I think that the outcome of this is going to be similar," Graham predicts.
The president has not cited specific examples of any fiction and lies, but Graham says a laundry list to choose from is available.
"The Russian collusion, the way that they were wrong about the Hunter Biden laptop, they basically suggested that all the deaths that happened in 2020 under COVID were Trump's fault, and then suddenly in 2021, not a single COVID death was Biden's fault," Graham lists.
He says it is important to note the president is not telling these or any other outlets what they can write, just from where they can write it.
Even so, the other TV networks in the reporting pool — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox — showed solidarity by refusing to participate in the White House TV pool and to cover the president's daily activities while the ban on the trio remains in place.
Graham says President Trump has more informal press gaggles in a month than Joe Biden had in his entire four years in office.
"What they are producing we wouldn't necessarily call a news product," the media watchdog asserts. "It's a very critical, anti-Trump product that they make."
He says the president has had enough of the double standard.
"You don't hold Democrats accountable, and you're terrible at assembling a historical record," Graham observes. "When it comes to Trump, they create a hysterical record."
While individual news organizations have occasionally pulled reporters from specific briefings or localized gaffs/disputes in the past, Reuters says a collective, cross-network halt of pooled presidential television coverage in direct protest of administration press bans breaks decades-long operational practices; a unified five-network suspension of the rotating pool stands out as a historic standoff.
The White House has shown no signs of backing down on the president's decision to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico, but most media and legal observers say the news organizations are likely to succeed in court this week, and their journalists will soon be back on the grounds.
