Comment: Trump isn’t first president to treat press badly

By Stephen L. Carter / Bloomberg Opinion

I don’t know whether the Associated Press will ultimately prevail in its legal challenge to the Trump administration’s reckless and petty decision to kick the venerable organization out of the press pool, which has more White House access than other credentialed journalists.

The lawsuit took a hit on Friday when a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit tossed a lower court’s preliminary injunction, allowing the White House to reinstate parts of the ban. But as the litigation continues, it’s worth noting that punishing the press out of presidential pique is nothing new.

The current controversy arose in February, after the AP refused to revise its style guide to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by President Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America.” The administration, with its typical small-mindedness, stripped the AP of its usual insider’s seat. But punishing journalists for refusing to follow government orders is pretty much the opposite of freedom of the press.

Still, nobody should have been surprised. The administration’s action, although wrong, was not without Trumpian precedent. And not without non-Trumpian precedent either.

Although I have some sympathy with Judge Cornelia Pillard’s dissenting opinion in the AP case, I fear she’s imprecise when she asserts that “participation in the Press Pool or the broader White House press corps has never been conditioned on the viewpoint expressed outside the Pool by any participating news organization; until now.”

The unfortunate truth is that presidents have acted badly toward reporters who criticize them for as long as we’ve had presidents and reporters. History abounds with examples.

Indeed, long before there existed a White House press corps, presidential peevishness led to the punishment of newspapers. We could go back to Abraham Lincoln and John Adams, who might reasonably rank first and second on the list of the nation’s best presidents, but both of whose administrations jailed journalists whose reporting they didn’t like.

A better point of departure might be 1904, when Jesse Carmichael of the Boston Herald filed a story about the Thanksgiving Day antics of Theodore Roosevelt’s children, who the paper claimed had chased a turkey across the lawn. “Why should the Roosevelt children be allowed to torment and frighten an innocent bird?” the article concluded. The president’s secretary — the office of press secretary did not yet exist — denied that the incident had taken place. But the denial did not satisfy Roosevelt, who ordered both Carmichael and his paper barred from receiving any news releases, not only from the White House, but from all executive departments. The Herald was not even permitted access to official weather forecasts. (The newspaper stood its ground, insisting that Roosevelt had been “misinformed” about the contents of the story.)

Roosevelt’s hostility toward the press was legendary. When, just before the 1908 election, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World reported that the Roosevelt family had profited from the Panama Canal deal, the president informed Congress ominously that the attorney general “has under consideration” charges against the newspaper; a message condemned even by editors friendly to the administration. Roosevelt was undeterred by the criticism. Shortly before leaving office, he filed a lawsuit for criminal libel against the World and a second newspaper. The U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately throw out the case, not because it offended freedom of the press, but on the ground that the federal judiciary lacked jurisdiction.

Speaking of Roosevelts, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House, reporters were forbidden to photograph the chief executive in his wheelchair. The historian Harold Holzer, in his engrossing 2020 book on the history of the relationship between the press and presidents, tells us that what FDR’s White House styled as a “request” was firmly enforced: “Persistent offenders risked losing their press credentials.” How effective was the ban? According to Holzer, a later study found that of 35,000 surviving photographs of FDR, only two showed him in his wheelchair.

On the other hand, it apparently isn’t true, as often reported, that President Richard Nixon barred The Washington Post from covering his daughter Tricia’s 1971 wedding. What did happen, according to biographer John A. Farrell, is that Nixon was so incensed by what he considered the Post’s “snide” coverage of the event that he ordered Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, to keep the newspaper from attending future White House social events. Then, says Farrell, the president went further: “They’re never to be in the White House again. Never! Is that clear?” It does not appear that the ban was ever enforced. Perhaps Ziegler knew enough to let his boss calm down.

And for those who can stretch their memories back to that ancient year 2023, it was Joe Biden’s administration that rewrote the credentialing rules to rid itself of Cameroonian journalist Simon Ateba, whose offense was evidently shouting over others to get his questions heard. The White House called him disruptive; Ateba claimed that he had to interrupt because he was never called on; and that he was never called on because the administration disliked his views. Either way, the new rules, which limited credentials to those employed by news organizations, excluded hundreds of others as well.

None of this history is meant to excuse the Trump administration’s decision to kick the AP out of the Oval Office over a line in the organization’s style guide. The decision was petty, disquieting and wrong. Perhaps the courts will yet strike it down. My point, rather, is that it’s been a tragedy of our history that presidents good and bad have frequently taken out their anger on the press. That the news media have survived White House pettishness might be described as a glory of our democracy.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”