Has Trump’s ban against the media backfired?

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0:30and more options to their line-up, can shop at machinefinder.com. Booyah! It's Trump versus the media again. We started the week with Donald Trump banning three major news organisations from the White House. We are ending the week with a win for the media, at least for now, although the judge has ordered a temporary reprieve that press credentials should be immediately restored for CNN, Politico and MS Now. Now, the battle is not over. So what will the Trump administration do next to stifle media coverage that he doesn't like? And who wins in the battle to control the media? Is it going to be Donald Trump or the press?

1:13Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth because she's way out of your league. The tide is coming, and this time we intend to win it all. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. When I'm not around, you're going to be broke. There's not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

1:55Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. And it is Marianna sitting next to Justin in the worldwide headquarters. And it's Anthony here in the American headquarters of AmeriCast in Washington, D.C. OK, and later on, we're going to be joined by Frank Cessna. I've already interviewed Frank, actually, and Frank is a former White House correspondent for CNN, someone who teaches journalism now and is very much a critic of what the Trump administration has done, which you would expect, but also someone who's quite knowledgeable about the extent to which any of this might have happened in recent decades.

2:31And if I give you a quick kind of spoiler alert, he doesn't think it would have happened or did happen in any previous decade. And he's been around a long time, has Frank. So it's going to be interesting to sort of put this into an historical context, just how bizarre and potentially, I suppose, groundbreaking this this row is. But, Anthony, let's go to the row itself. First of all, maybe take us back to how it how it began. So what is it that the Trump administration has actually stopped happening and what is it that they've lost, at least at this stage in court? Well, this was all announced by Donald Trump on Truth Social last week.

3:09He said that he was going to be banning CNN, MSNOW, which used to be known as MSNBC, the cable news network, and Politico, which is a website and big media outlet here in Washington, D.C., from accessing the White House, from covering the White House, from being part of any pool or being in press briefings, even from setting foot on the White House grounds. That caused a bit of an uproar. On Saturday, we found out exactly what that meant. That meant that when reporters from Politico, CNN and MSN now tried to enter the White House grounds, they had their press credentials confiscated by the Secret Service.

3:45They were not allowed in. They were turned away essentially at the gate. When you go to cover the White House, there's a big fence around the building. You have to show your pass. You have to swipe it. And when these reporters swipe their pass to go through the metal detectors and enter the White House grounds, the Secret Service says, oh, no, took the passes away and they were asked to leave. All of this created an uproar over the weekend, led to a decision by the other TV networks that cover the White House as part of a pooled coverage, along with CNN, to stop doing that until CNN was granted access.

4:22And then these three media outlets filed a lawsuit against the White House, claiming that the ban was violating their First Amendment freedom of the press rights. So Donald Trump, Mariana, is no longer anywhere to be seen? He has been silenced totally by this or not? Yeah, very much not silenced. There has been less TV coverage of Donald Trump because some of the other organisations aren't taking part in the pool, which we chatted about on American Answers, and therefore he's not being filmed. And that includes actually Fox News. But obviously also remember Donald Trump is very good at posting a lot about himself.

4:59So how much does he need the television is kind of another question. And the administration have announced the launch of this thing, Trump TV, but the sound was not so good. Not of America's levels. Listen to what happened on Monday. This is material released by the White House for the unveiling of a helipad. The president is speaking, but you can't really hear it.

5:28It's like when you choose to sleep with rain noise, but like helicopter noise. You know, I mean, I've covered a lot of Donald Trump's helipad press conferences, the gaggles, and it is loud there. And unless you have a really good microphone, a directional expensive microphone, you're right up next to Trump. You're not going to get that. Well, that's the kind of audio you would get. So, yeah, you know, now they're getting the coverage of the White House without the the bias of expensive microphones, at least. And it's worth saying as well that Donald Trump does not appear to be stepping down when it comes to his kind of feud with CNN.

6:04uh is he so he he was confronted uh or maybe just asked a question is probably a better way of putting it from by cnn's caitlin collins at um the un general assembly this week it was quite a pointed question but let's let's hear his answer so it's an honor to be here i'm surprised that cnn is here covering me you shouldn't be here you should not you should not be here covering me you said you weren't going to cover me you shouldn't be covering me but but i will tell you it is an honor to be at the United Nations and we're making a lot of progress our country is doing really really well thank you very much everybody.

6:38Donald Trump when he made that announcement that he was banning CNN and MS Now and Politico he said it was because they were fake news and he criticized what he said with a slant of their liberal media bias and for a president to be able to to pick and choose which outlets can can have access to the White House based on their ideology or the perceived hostility of their coverage. I mean, those are big legal issues. And so I don't think anyone at CNN or Politico or MSNOW is eager to be kicked off of the White House grounds and have to cover the White House from arm's length. But, you know, Caitlin Collins, she is a professional.

7:17And she was there at the United Nations covering Trump because CNN is still covering Trump. They didn't say they weren't going to cover him. It's just they weren't going to use the video from the pool within the White House. And when Trump is traveling, that was a public event where there was wider press access. And CNN was one of the outlets that was able to get that wider press access. So Trump shouldn't be surprised that they weren't there. If he thought that this ban was going to keep CNN from covering him entirely, I think he was mistaken. and there there is a also the issue of exactly what you just said isn't it anthony it's the picking and choosing that is the thing that is legally suspect and that this judge is found against it's not whether or not there is access because look in the time of joe biden there were times where the press were wanting more access to him and he wasn't delivering it but he wasn't delivering it on the basis of i don't like you fox news or i don't like you whatever that he was just not delivering it and that's perfectly legal and perfectly constitutional anthony isn't it it's it's the it's the picking and choosing right based on their opinions but is it i just occurs to me is even as i'm asking you the question what if i i don't know a foreign power had a white house correspondent who was particularly i don't know unpleasant or had views that were particularly outside the U.S.

8:45mainstream. But has it ever been settled in law that you're aware of, kind of what is acceptable and what isn't? Yeah, there was actually an instance during the Biden administration where a reporter for Africa Now, who was always interrupting in press conferences, always shouting down folks and cutting off questioners because he felt like he was being ignored. He sued the White House, in part because they were not renewing his press credentials as part of a Biden administration-wide attempt to pare back who could cover the White House. But it wasn't based on ideology. It was based on circulation.

9:22It was based on how often reporters came and set foot on the White House. So people who had passes but were inactive, they ended up losing them. And he didn't win that lawsuit. So, I mean, in theory, I suppose you could kick a hostile member of the foreign press out of the White House, as long as you did it on non-ideological grounds, unless there was maybe a national security concern. And actually, national security was one of the defenses that Trump's lawyers have put up to his decision to target CNN and Politico and MS Now, although that hasn't been successful. Yeah, and of course, Anthony, what the administration is saying, or at least what J.D.

10:03Vance, the vice president, is saying, is that this is something where there is precedent, actually. So he compared Donald Trump's treatment of these news outlets, the way that Barack Obama treated right wing outlets, outlets like Breitbart during the Obama administration. Let's just listen to what J.D. Vance is claiming. Well, they can still report on the Trump White House. They can still get the public reports. They can still, of course, talk to people in the administration and outside the administration. What the president has said is we're not going to give you special access inside the White House.

10:34The way that I think about it is if you go back to the Biden administration or the Obama administration, compare, let's say, Politico to Breitbart. If you actually look at the objective analysis, Politico and Breitbart are, Politico is as anti-Trump as Breitbart was anti-Obama or anti-Biden. Now, why on God's green earth would Donald Trump be expected to give Politico special access when nobody in the media expected the Biden administration or the Obama administration to give Breitbart special access? It's about basic fairness. They can still report. They still have the access to free speech. They're just not going to get an office in the White House anymore.

11:10And I think it's totally appropriate unless, of course, they start to behave like real news organizations. Anthony, what do you make of that? He seems to disagree with you. A few a few little factual factual things there. Breitbart never was kicked off the grounds of the White House. They they had access to press conferences. They had access to the White House grounds for doing videos, etc. What they did want and what they tried to get from the Obama White House was a seat in the rotating press pool covering the White House. And actually back then, those seats, those positions in the pool were determined by the White House Correspondents Association, not by the White House.

11:50That, of course, has changed since Trump came back to power. Now the Trump administration directly says who it is and isn't in the White House press pools and right-wing outlets like Breitbart have been included. But I think more largely, Politico is a major news organization here in Washington, D.C. They're established. They didn't get access to the press pool right off the bat when they first were founded. They built up their reputation. They have huge resources, which is different than some of these smaller right-wing outlets. And when the smaller white wing outlets aren't included with press credentials or with pool access, it's much more a reflection of their circulation and their size.

12:37And they're not being discriminated against based on their viewpoints, because there are plenty of left wing news outlets, smaller ones that also don't necessarily get press credentials and certainly don't get access to press pools. Isn't some of this about how, well, the White House, I guess, but more generally, we define what a credible news organization is now because you've obviously got traditional professional journalists who are trained to hold people accountable ask questions use all the kit do all the other bits and who may work for an organization that does have a more left-wing or more right-wing approach but broadly like their job is to ask questions and get and get answers whereas if you're starting to then equate them to what we kind of call the alternative media circuit or outlets many of whom are people who kind of go beyond like a slant right like they are like they absolutely hate one side love another and are accused of spreading outright misinformation or stuff that's just completely not true i don't know this feels to me like the culmination of a tension that has been building for a while between like what we consider to be a journalist and outlets now and donald trump is very philosophical now yeah oh gosh and Anthony's not even wearing a tie.

13:54I don't know where we go from here. No patches on my elbows. No patches on your elbows. You haven't got your professorial jacket on. Oh, man. Look, even without the jacket, what Mariana brings up is really interesting, isn't it? Because there are those organisations that can be embarrassed still if you prove to them and to a reasonable member of the public that what they have just said isn't right. And they're held accountable, right? Yeah, and they're accountable. They have to be held accountable. And then there are those organizations who wouldn't mind whether you provide that information or not and just sail on.

14:28And it's a distinction that I suppose we all understand. But whether it kind of works politically in defense of the news organizations, Anthony, in the modern era, I'm not quite sure. Yeah. And there are some right wing news outlets that have very big audiences at this point. There are right wing influencers, as Marianna will attest to, who have audiences of tens of millions. I mean, that's bigger than a lot of newspapers that used to be considered established and trusted brands back in the day would have. Their reach would be much, much smaller. Their circulation is much smaller. So how do you draw a line of what's a news outlet, what's not when there are no standards anymore, at least no kind of independently verifiable standards?

15:11That's a good question. And this Trump administration has really thrown the door open to a much wider cross section, at least of the right wing media. And Lindell TV, the Mike Lindell, the guy, the MyPillow guy, who was a big conspiracy theorist, he has a TV network now and they have access to the press pool and they're showing up. And it's their reporters who are asking questions in these smaller gaggles and Oval Office meetings where only six or seven reporters are there. Now, sometimes you get three or four that are from right wing news outlets, whereas under the Biden administration, it would be the more traditional mainstream media and wire services, newspapers, TV networks, etc.

15:53OK, that is it for us or for both of you, because this is the moment we should hear from Frank Sesno. So Frank is a former longtime CNN correspondent. I first met him when we covered the Reagan presidency. He spent two decades at CNN, many, many roles. He was Washington Bureau chief. He was White House correspondent for a bit as well. He is currently a professor of journalism at George Washington University, which, of course, is in Washington, D.C. So we started our conversation with the latest court judgment overturning, as it did, the initial Trump media ban. Well, the judge thinks that the White House has gotten everything wrong here, principally.

16:36And he hangs his decision to those reporters should have their passes reinstated immediately on the fact that there was no due process. And he says and he quotes a case from 1977. Those are sort of stands on serious precedent that the interest of a bona fide Washington correspondent obtaining a White House press pass qualifies as a liberty. he writes and cites liberty interest, which may not be denied without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment. And by that, he means there was no notification. There are no standards. There was nothing that the White House based the revocation of these press passes on, other than Donald Trump saying on Friday that he didn't like the coverage and that he said he didn't like the coverage because it was too negative and fake and all that undermined another part of the case that the White House tried to make late that the judge thoroughly rejected, which was that the reporting threatened national security, which is ludicrous.

17:36And the judge didn't use that word. I'm using that word because a lot of the things that the White House alleged in the reports that were damaging, Donald Trump as president of the United States had already said on camera, talking about the ballroom as a military installation, some of these other things. So the judge who is a Trump Trump appointee, very important to point that out, says that the court is skeptical of the national security issues and that they offered little to back up their asserted national security interests. So this was a thorough rejection of the White House. It's only a temporary restraining order.

18:17It's good for 14 days, but looks very likely to stand. Well, that's the interesting thing, isn't it, Frank? So because you there have been these cases in the past, haven't there, where a judge has intervened and kind of held back the White House for a bit. And eventually it's gone all the way up the courts, possibly to the Supreme Court in some cases. And eventually the White House has got its way. Not always, but often with this, you're looking at this judgment and thinking they're unlikely to. Is that is that fair? Yeah. And the judge says so himself. He said this case is likely to prevail on the merits.

18:48And they're going, the journalism organizations and all the amicus briefs that were filed by other news organizations on behalf of them cite two of our cherished amendments. The First Amendment, right to a free press and right to free speech, and the fifth, which is due process. And he's focusing on the due process here. But the other thing the judge says, which I read and took great notice of, is that he also said the public interest also favors the plaintiffs. So there's not much question here where he stands. And in fact, this is kind of funny, but you have to cover legal expenses sometimes when you go to court.

19:25So the judge asked the plaintiffs, meaning the news organizations, to post a$1 bond to cover legal costs. So guess where he comes out? Yeah, that's really interesting, isn't it? So the question, what was the White House thinking? And I think often you think of the actions of Donald Trump not necessarily being purposive in saying, I want this to happen, but being performative and performative sometimes with great political impact. Is that another of those things? It's performative. He just wanted to do it. I think your question, what was the White House thinking, is such a great question to apply to this situation because the White House wasn't thinking.

20:09There was no strategy on this. There was almost no, if any, senior staff consultation. Trump was shown this negative coverage that had been built up by his 34-year-old staff assistant, Natalie Harp, who brings him the good news and I guess some of the bad news. Famous Natalie. We've profiled her on the pod before. There you go. And he got mad, which he does. And then in the Oval Office, he announces, and on Truth Social, he announces this ban because he didn't like the coverage. I mean, that's what he said. He didn't make any reference to national security. He didn't make any reference to anything other than the negativity and the quote-unquote fake news.

20:48Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, was traveling. There is no full-time press secretary now. So there did not appear to be the kind of proper vetting that there should be in consideration of this. And the backlash has been incredible and across the board. And this is rich with ironies, right, Justin? Because the judge is a Trump-appointed judge who said, uh-uh, can't do this. And one of the people who took the lead on behalf of news organizations, who's the chair of the press pool, the White House press pool now, is the Fox News bureau chief. And last I checked, Fox News was a conservative news organization.

21:27So Trump's been slapped down by his own team. Where does this leave him? Because you assume that most Americans don't care an awful lot about this stuff. And the constitutional side of it, I suppose, is interesting because there are some Americans who care a lot about the Constitution. And I think all Americans, if they were poked, would say, yeah, we care a lot about it. But it doesn't seem ever to kind of bleed across into political thought and political decision making. In other words, people can say, yeah, we support the Constitution when it seems to be messed with. I mean, as with the emoluments clause, I suppose, and the whole business of the amount of money that the Trump family has made in recent times, it doesn't seem to have a huge political impact, does it?

22:10So does this, do you think? You know, yes, I do. And I think that what we may be seeing is the whiplash, backlash, boomerang effect of the president's own everything, everywhere, all at once strategy. For a time, that really worked because it distracted and it derailed and it did a lot of things. But now what seems to be happening is things are piling up one on the other, and none of them are really cutting in the president's favor, either politically or from a policy perspective right now. Americans love their media. Whether they hate the media they love, they're highly critical of it. And we need to say this in the media.

22:51We need to be much more humble about how we do our jobs, why the public doesn't trust us because we know they don't, and what we can do about it. But still, they want to consume the media they want to consume. And I think, you know, this whole thing, this whole flap around rejecting reporters because you don't like them. You know, Ari Fleischer, who was George W. Bush's press secretary and has been very pro-Trump in recent years, quickly posted and said, today it's a Republican kicking out liberals. Tomorrow, reporters, he sees as liberals. Tomorrow, it could be a liberal president kicking out conservatives.

23:31This is not what we should do. And I work with Ari Fleischer very closely. And I know that Ari very much believes in the Constitution. So I think, yes, I think this does get through, Justin, in a number of ways. You know, people don't pull up to the bar with a beer and say, hey, let's talk about freedom of the press. They don't do that. But it's part of the orchestra here. And that's what's going on is the instruments and the orchestra are not playing together. And is it unique? I mean, I first met you, Frank, when you were covering Ronald Reagan. It's incredible. I've aged us both a bit, haven't I?

24:06I think we were both in kindergarten at the time, Justin. I think we were very young men. We were very young men. But the fact is that you were covering a Ronald Reagan visit to London. And Ronald Reagan was a guy who clashed with the way things had been done in the past and was quite a radical in many respects. I mean, looking back to those times and any time since, I suppose, has there ever been anything like this where a White House had become so frustrated or apparently frustrated with the way that it's covered that it's actually taken these kinds of actions? No, nothing close to this. And in fact, I'm glad you raised Ronald Reagan because one of Ronald Reagan's press secretaries, I think you knew him, Larry Speaks was his name, famously said more than once to us, and we had very tense relationships at times with Speaks and the White House press operation.

24:56But he would say, look, you don't tell me how to manage the news and I won't tell you how to report the news. And there was that very interesting, sometimes tense, adversarial relationship that nonetheless was built on a respect for their jobs and the roles we each played. We were there to ask tough, annoying questions. Well, we did that. And they were there to present the best face that they could. And they did that and to spin it as they could. And they did that. But you asked about the public. I do think that the American public gets one of the fundamentals here, which is that, as another presidential aide said during the Nixon years, those nattering nabobs of negativism, meaning reporters, are there to ask those nasty questions to keep people in power to account.

25:44We're in the room. Did you want us asking Jimmy Carter about America's hostages? Did you want us asking Richard Nixon about Watergate or bombing Cambodia? Did you want to ask Ronald Reagan about Iran-Contra? Did you want to ask George W. Bush about the war in Iraq? These are questions that we need to ask, and they're not nice sometimes. But, you know, Prime Minister's Question Time is a noisy affair in the United Kingdom, right? But it's part of the democracy. It's part of the noise. And people may hate it, but they also appreciate it. It's interesting. You said there is a political impact potentially of this.

26:20I'm just thinking if I were a Republican congressman up for re-election this November, or indeed looking for a Senate seat and that huge fight that's going on for the majority in the Senate, which looks genuinely open, doesn't it? If I were those people, I kind of quite like the idea of Donald Trump being muted a bit. In other words, I think I'd want the boycott, et cetera, to go ahead. I mean, just politically, it seemed to me that it doesn't necessarily, it's not a bad thing for the Republican Party. Well, it was really interesting that you mentioned that because yesterday, last night, I was watching television and there were all these stories about Chinese President Xi Jinping here.

27:03no pictures because there's no pool camera right no oval office handshake very i mean there was stuff at andrews because that was andrews uh joint air base that was open for some of the president trump went there to greet xi jinping but and you know i said a moment ago this this whole thing is so rich in irony here's the other irony donald trump is a tv addict he's never met a camera or a microphone he doesn't love and so to deprive him of that is to deprive him of the mother's milk, of the attention that he thrives on. And so I think the politics of this and wanting a muted Trump, we saw that yesterday, as I said, with no pictures, we're starting to see some very interesting things, Justin, with Republican candidates up for the midterms in remarkably red states, distancing, starting to distance themselves from Trump in ways that we have never seen throughout all the years of Trumpism in states like Iowa, even in Florida.