In banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House, the Trump administration has argued that the move is similar to actions taken by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But the ban goes beyond what those presidents did.
In a Sept. 21 press release, three days after President Donald Trump said the news organizations would be barred “effective immediately,” the White House said that “[a]ccess changes are nothing new,” and that “Democrat Administrations have restricted, punished, and locked out the press” for “years.” The release listed several examples of incidents involving the press during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“There’s no basis to suggest that Biden and Obama ‘did it too,’” Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told us. “Trump’s action is singular and unprecedented,” he said, noting that Trump has instituted a “full ban of multiple news media” and “is targeting news organizations because they are publishing content he finds unflattering.
“That violates the First Amendment prohibition against government using its power to punish ideas,” Paulson said.
Trump announced the ban on Sept. 18 in a post on Truth Social, saying it was due to reporting what he called “FAKE NEWS.” When questioned by reporters later that day, Trump repeated that he was doing this “because they’re fake news.” He said the news organizations “purposely write negative news” in order to “try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration.”
We’ll explain what happened in some of the instances under Obama and Biden cited in the White House press release and by other Republicans. First Amendment experts told us that Trump’s ban is different.
Amy Kristin Sanders, a professor of First Amendment studies at Penn State University, told us that Trump’s action was “unprecedented,” “particularly when taken in light of President Trump’s public stance about why he banned the news organizations.”
“What the Trump Administration has done is revoke access for news organizations that have already been granted press access while publicly saying it is because President Trump doesn’t like the way he is being covered by those news organizations,” Sanders told us in an email. “These outlets are being targeted specifically because they engaged in critical coverage.”
Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defends free speech rights on college campuses and elsewhere, said, “Past presidents have limited outlets’ White House access based on hostility toward their reporting. For example, the Nixon administration, displeased with the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, barred one of the paper’s reporters from covering White House social events.” And the Obama administration initially excluded Fox News from a TV reporting pool for one interview (we’ll explain that incident below).
“But I don’t know of any past example of a president indefinitely banning a media outlet from the White House,” Terr told us.
The White House press release defended the president’s ban. “The First Amendment protects their right to publish; it does not entitle them to a hard pass, briefing room seat, or place in the press pool,” the release said.
Terr disagreed. “Just last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reaffirmed that when the White House opens its facilities to the press generally, it cannot exclude reporters based on disapproval of their views,” he said, calling the action a violation of the First Amendment.
CNN, Politico and MS NOW sued the administration, asking a federal judge to block enforcement of Trump’s ban and to restore their access to the White House. Administration officials responded in a court filing saying that the news organizations “have failed to maintain basic minimum ‘standards of professionalism and decorum’” by “‘publishing sensitive or classified information.’” A hearing was held Sept. 23.
In response to Trump’s action, the other major TV networks said they wouldn’t participate in pool coverage of the president’s events.
Obama and Fox News
In its press release, the White House highlighted a feud between the Obama White House and Fox News in 2009, early in Obama’s presidency. The Obama White House questioned whether Fox News was a legitimate news organization and excluded “Fox News Sunday” when the president made the rounds on all of the other Sunday news talk shows. And the Treasury Department reportedly tried to limit access for Fox News to an interview with an administration official.
“In 2009, the Obama White House attempted to exclude a Fox News reporter from an interview with an unpaid executive pay consultant for the U.S. Treasury Department. Other news organizations objected to the effort and supported Fox and it never occurred again,” Paulson told us. “Continuance of this practice would have raised significant First Amendment questions.”
In a Sept. 19 talk at Colgate University, Obama commented on Trump’s ban on certain news outlets. “I’m trying to think what would’ve happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News, you’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.” Obama didn’t kick out the network from the White House. But his administration took other actions against Fox News, and the Justice Department also surveilled one of the network’s reporters as part of aggressive measures to curtail leaks to the media.
We wrote about these actions in 2018, when Obama said he had “complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down or call them enemies of the people,” a reference to Trump repeatedly calling the media that. As we said then, Obama did more than complain. He didn’t use the phrase “enemies of the people,” though he did say that Fox News’ “point of view” was “ultimately destructive” to the U.S.
On Sept. 20, 2009, Obama appeared on the Sunday talk shows on NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC and Univision, but ignored “Fox News Sunday.” Asked about the snub, White House spokesman Josh Earnest criticized Fox for not airing Obama’s Sept. 9, 2009, joint address to Congress on healthcare. The speech did air on the Fox News Channel, however — but not the broadcast network. Obama didn’t make it to “Fox News Sunday” until his last year in office.
In October 2009, the White House ramped up its rhetoric. Anita Dunn, the White House director of communications, told the New York Times, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent” and said that “we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” When asked about Dunn’s comments, White House senior adviser David Axelrod said that “it’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.” He added, “We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”
That same month, the Treasury Department reportedly tried to exclude Fox News from a pool TV interview of an administration official, Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called “pay czar.” The White House disputed that account, saying the issue was merely a miscommunication. But Fox News and other news outlets reported that the Treasury Department had tried to leave Fox News out of the pool, until the other TV networks protested. “All the networks said, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” CBS News White House correspondent Chip Reid told his own network.
Fox News did interview Feinberg.
“The Obama administration’s exclusion of Fox News from a pool was rightly condemned as an attack on press freedom,” Terr told us. “The White House also lists a couple of other examples of the Obama administration reportedly restricting or threatening to restrict reporters’ access. Of course, none of that justifies what the Trump administration is doing now. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And the Trump administration’s wrong — a directive from the top to ban three outlets from the White House indefinitely over their critical or negative reporting — appears to be unprecedented in its scope and severity.”
Obama Administration Pursuit of Leaks
The Justice Department under Obama also aggressively investigated leaks of information to the media, surveilling or subpoenaing journalists in the process, including Fox News reporter James Rosen. In 2010, the DOJ tracked Rosen’s movements at the State Department and collected his telephone and email records, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story in 2013.
In the affidavit for a search warrant to obtain emails, the FBI agent described Rosen as “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin told the Washington Post.
In 2012, the DOJ also seized two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press.
In 2017, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote: “Under the Obama administration, charges were brought against at least eight government employees or contractors accused of leaking information to the media, and several journalists were snared in the process through subpoenas to testify or surveillance of their records. After public outcry, the Department of Justice released revised standards for subpoenaing reporters.”
The aggressive posture against leaks, and reporters, continued under Trump’s first term and has escalated in his second. In an August report, CPJ said the DOJ in Trump’s second term had issued subpoenas involving at least 10 journalists, “marking one of the most aggressive uses of legal powers against the press in the United States in decades.” It cited the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which found that over Biden’s term three such subpoenas were issued and just one was issued in Trump’s first term.
Biden’s Stricter Criteria for White House Press Badges
Asked about Trump banning the media outlets from the White House press room, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise falsely equated Trump’s move to a situation during the Biden administration when it placed greater restrictions on those seeking a hard pass allowing access to the White House press facilities.
“Joe Biden removed the press credentials from over 400 different agencies,” Scalise said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sept. 20.
The White House parroted Scalise’s claim in its press release the following day, claiming, “The Biden Administration restricted more than 440 reporters from White House access through a new, retroactive press credentialing process — with independent and conservative journalists taking a heavy share of the hit. The White House Correspondents’ Association barely objected.”
But those claims are misleading at best.
As ABC News’ Jonathan Karl pointed out during the interview with Scalise, “The 400 individual reporters who [lost] credentials did not reapply. There was only one that was actually denied a credential. And all of those who didn’t reapply were allowed to come in.”
“They were removed,” Scalise said.
“They were not banned from the White House,” Karl said. “That did not happen.”
Here’s what did happen. In May 2023, the Biden administration established new, stricter rules for who could obtain a “hard pass” allowing routine access to the White House press areas without an escort. As the Washington Post explained at the time, in order to be eligible for a hard pass, a journalist had to be “employed full time by an organization principally concerned with news dissemination; must reside in the greater Washington, D.C., area; must have gone to the White House for work at least once during the prior six months; and must hold press credentials for either the Supreme Court, Senate or House.”
The White House at the time estimated that 40% of the journalists who had hard passes hadn’t even been to the White House in the previous 90 days.
In August of that year, Politico reported that over the first three months under the new Biden-era rules, the number of hard pass holders dropped from 1,417 to 975. Most of the drop was attributed to journalists who simply didn’t reapply. According to Politico, only one person who applied was denied a pass under the new criteria.
Importantly, though, even journalists without a hard pass could still get access to the White House press briefings by obtaining a daily pass, which required a journalist to provide personal information to clear security.
Jen Psaki, who served as White House press secretary under Biden from January 2021 to May 2022, posted a video to TikTok on Sept. 21 calling Scalise’s taking point “total BS.”
“So what the White House did was they put in place a couple of requirements that are pretty standard,” Psaki said, noting that “there were a lot of people with hard passes out there that had not used it in several years.”
“But [conservative] outlets like Breitbart and Fox and OAN and Newsmax all got hard passes because the criteria had nothing to do with how you were covering the administration,” Psaki said. “It was whether you were meeting those basic standard requirements, which is very much aligned with what the Senate and the House requires as well.”
Reporters who did not regularly cover the White House could still get access to White House press briefings “simply by getting day passes, and that is something that the Biden White House granted to a huge number of people from a range of news outlets,” Psaki said. “None were prevented from getting access to the White House because of their coverage. That is a big difference between then and what’s happening now.”
After his “This Week” interview, Scalise pushed back on X on Karl’s live fact-check.
“This morning, ABC tried to claim the Biden White House didn’t cut off press access for over 400 journalists,” Scalise wrote. “The facts say otherwise.”
He cited a Fox News story in August 2023 that claimed, “More than 440 reporters lose press passes after White House changes requirements.”
The White House correspondent for Today News Africa filed a lawsuit claiming the Biden administration discriminated against him by changing the criteria. However, a D.C. District Court judge ruled in favor of the White House, saying the criteria established by the Biden White House for hard pass credentials was “facially reasonable” and “viewpoint neutral.” As a result, the judge noted, passes were not denied based on the content of stories produced by applicants.
In Trump’s case, Sanders, the Penn State professor, told us, “These outlets are being targeted specifically because they engaged in critical coverage.”
“The Biden administration did change the credentialing requirements for ‘hard pass’ access, causing some journalists not to renew their hard passes and possibly making some journalists ineligible for a hard pass,” Sanders said. “This is different than excluding members of the WHCA from pool coverage based on the viewpoints they express in their journalism.”
The Free Speech Center’s Paulson likened the Biden rules “to a public library requiring patrons to prove residency before renewing a library card. There were no First Amendment issues.”
Terr, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that “there were legitimate concerns about the new rules, including that they disadvantaged smaller outlets and freelancers. The rules also gave the administration discretion to discipline journalists who didn’t act in a ‘professional manner,’ a vague and subjective standard that could be abused to punish aggressive questioning.”
However, Terr said, the Biden administration “used viewpoint-neutral criteria to determine access” and “didn’t go so far as to ban any outlet from the White House over unfavorable coverage.”
Other Instances of Press Access
The White House press release highlighted several other instances of reporters not getting access to certain events.
Boston Herald
The White House said that Obama press officials had raised the issue of fairness when denying the Boston Herald full access to a May 2011 fundraising event.
“Obama White House officials restricted the Boston Herald from coverage — writing that pool slots depended on covering Obama ‘fairly’ — after the paper ran a front page Mitt Romney op-ed,” the White House press release said.
The Herald reported that Matt Lehrich, an Obama White House spokesperson, told the newspaper that the Herald’s request was denied because the White House Correspondents’ Association had already granted local pool coverage to the Herald’s competitor, the Boston Globe. However, Lehrich did suggest that covering Obama “regularly” and “fairly” were factors in which outlets are selected for press pool assignments.
“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” the Herald said Lehrich wrote when replying to the Herald’s request for full access to the fundraiser.
In emails with the Herald, Lehrich had brought up the newspaper publishing a front-page editorial critical of Obama that was written by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama’s eventual Republican presidential opponent, in March 2011. “My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits,” the Herald said Lehrich wrote.
But “Lehrich insisted the Herald may yet be allowed into Obama events,” the Herald said.
San Francisco Chronicle
The White House press release also accurately recounted a conflict between the Obama White House and the San Francisco Chronicle in April 2011. However, the former Chronicle reporter involved said that what happened then is “very different” from what Trump is doing now.
“After a San Francisco Chronicle reporter recorded protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser, White House officials threatened to strip the outlet from access and warned of retaliation if the paper reported on it,” the White House press release said.
“That’s true,” Carla Marinucci, the Chronicle’s former senior political writer, told the Chronicle for a Sept. 21 story about the incident. She said Obama’s press aides “went insane” on the Chronicle after she posted a video she recorded of the protest, which the press team argued violated pool protocol because the event coverage was limited to print reporters. As a result of the dustup, Marinucci said the Obama White House “blocked us from the local press pool for a year.”
But Marinucci said what Obama’s press aides did is not on the same level as what Trump has done.
“They never accused us of posting fake news. They just didn’t want us to post a video,” Marinucci told the Chronicle. “That’s very different from saying these organizations are fake news and I don’t like what they are doing.”
She called Trump’s actions against the three news organizations a “complete violation of the First Amendment.”
Obama’s 2008 Campaign
The White House press release also said, “In the Obama campaign’s final days, senior campaign officials pulled reporters from three prominent outlets off the traveling press plane — restricting them from coverage after the papers endorsed Obama’s opponent.” The news outlets affected disagreed on whether the endorsements, which came from the editorial pages, played a role.
With three days to go before the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign removed journalists with the Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News from the pool of reporters traveling on Obama’s campaign plane. The campaign said that a lack of seats and high demand necessitated making some changes. Some of the newspapers affected said the move appeared to be retaliation for their individual editorial boards endorsing Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain.
“This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth,” John Solomon, then the executive editor of the Washington Times, said at the time.
However, Ryan Rusak, the politics editor at the Dallas Morning News, wrote that the paper didn’t have evidence the endorsement was the reason. “We think the Obama campaign’s decision is to some degree more a function of limited seats,” he wrote on the paper’s website, noting that he and the political reporter “had absolutely no input or knowledge of the endorsement.”
Rusak said an Obama campaign spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, told the paper the campaign needed space for Obama’s wife, Michelle, and her staff and Secret Service, and the endorsement didn’t play a role. “There are news organizations, as you look around you on the plane, whose editorial boards are never friendly to Senator Obama,” Douglass said. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal were still on the plane, Rusak said.
New York Post
Biden’s White House, the Trump administration’s press release said, “blocked New York Post reporter Steven Nelson from covering the President’s only daytime public event — despite empty seats in the room — after the reporter pressed Biden on his family’s shady business dealings.”
That’s a reference to a decision Biden officials made in May 2023 to exclude Nelson from the press covering an event featuring Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The Biden White House said Nelson was one of about two dozen reporters it could not accommodate due to a lack of space. But the New York Post said it suspected Nelson had been denied a press spot at the event because he had previously questioned Biden about the Biden family’s alleged dealings with foreign countries and the press staff didn’t want the president to face tough questions..
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