Last Thursday, the Judge Timothy J. Kelly ha bloccato for two weeks the president's decision Donald Trump di revoke accreditation for journalists to access the White House of television networks CNN e MS Now and the information site Politico.
The tycoon had initially accused them of spread deliberately fake news about him and, subsequently, of jeopardize national security with their work.
The suspension of The Donald's order, which forced the White House to readmit them, is only temporary to give the judge more time to evaluate the facts and was based on purely procedural aspects: the different reasons given by the presidency at different times to justify the badge collection (the risk to national security should have been indicated immediately) and, in particular, the circumstance for which the White House staff had not informed the reporters of the possibility of to file an appeal unless after the passes were confiscated, preventing them from asserting their rights before the measure adopted against them became enforceable.
However, this was a significant intervention to contain the abuses of the Trump administration, as Kelly was appointed to the position by the tycoon himself in 2017 and, therefore, cannot be accused of having acted for political reasons.
Trump and the media
Kelly's order is just the latest development in a diatribe that pits Trump against the media since the beginning of his first term.
At the time, The Donald had not hesitated for about forty times to define "enemies of the people”those journalists who criticized him and who, he said, by casting him in a bad light, hindered his efforts to implement a government program capable of solving the problems of the United States.
His violent attacks against the press would have encouraged physical assaults to at least twenty-four journalists, according to research by Jon Marshall (The Clash. Presidents and the Press in Times of Crisis, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
Furthermore, there is a precedent for what has happened in recent days dating back to Trump's first presidency. On November 8, 2018, Trump had the White House press room evicted, Jim Acosta, the chief correspondent of the CNN, following an altercation with the journalist.
After the accreditation was withdrawn, Acosta sued not only The Donald, but also Trump's spokeswoman, and the agents of the Secret Service who had physically removed him. Acosta regained his pass after Judge Kelly, the same judge who issued the injunction last Thursday, ruled in his favor.
Trump later said sued some television networks - from the SPC to the CBS – as well as the “New York Times" and the "Washington Post" as some news about him had reported, with different outcomes: out-of-court settlements, filings and lawsuits still in progress (such as the one brought for defamation against the British BBC, from which The Donald has asked for ten billion dollars in damages).
Last July, in an attempt to intimidate the press from spreading information unwelcome to the president, the Justice Department had raised comparison warrants against four reporters of the "New York Times” to learn the names of those from whom they had learned that, for security reasons, Trump had been forced to use the old Air Force One, instead of the $400 million Boeing 747-8 donated to him by the Emir of Qatar, to return to the United States from the NATO summit in Turkey.
The mandates were then revoked after a federal judge, Arun Subramanian, he had deemed them inappropriate, as they were aimed at forcing journalists to violate professional secrecy regarding the confidentiality of their trusted sources.
The Sedition Act of 1798
Trump's conflictual relationship with the media is generally traced back to the authoritarian tendencies of his administration which also denote the tendency to violate the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press.
Yet The Donald isn't the first president to try to muzzle the media. Indeed, the executive branch has been trying to subjugate journalism almost since the birth of the United States.
In 1798 Congress passed the Sedition Act, a law that punished with prison time anyone who published false, scandalous, or otherwise malicious statements against the federal government and the president.
It was the federalist who wanted the provision John Adams, the second president of the United States, to preemptively stifle criticism from Democratic-Republican journalists who might have favored his challenger in the 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson.
Among the first to be affected by the measure was John Daly Burk, an Irish immigrant, director of the “Time-Piece”, a New York newspaper that regularly attacked Adams's policies. Burk was arrested along with his partner James Smith, although the charges were later dropped, after the periodical ceased publication.
Another Irish immigrant, however, was sentenced to four months in prison and a fine of one thousand dollars (about 20.000 dollars today), Matthew Lyon, for having published an article in which he had ridiculed Adams, portraying him as a character with aristocratic tastes, eager to be flattered and inclined to avarice.
Lyon, who was a member of the House for the Democratic-Republican party, nevertheless had the satisfaction of being re-elected to Congress in 1800 while languishing in prison.
That same year, the Sedition Act also proved counterproductive on the issue Adams cared most about. The suspicion that the president had supported a liberticidal measure contributed to his defeat against Jefferson, and the law was not extended when it expired.
However, despite having defended freedom of the press Before becoming president, Jefferson himself had an idyllic relationship with journalists. Following the spread of rumors about his cohabitation with an African-American slave, Sally Hemings, one of the first political scandals in American history, in 1807 Jefferson replied to a correspondent who had asked him for advice on how to best manage a newspaper: “One cannot believe anything that one reads in a newspaper.
Truth itself has become suspect when placed in such an instrument.” It was a radical reversal of the position that, in 1787, had led Jefferson to assert that he preferred a press without government to a government without newspapers.
The nineteenth century
Il Sedition Act It was part of a package of four laws justified by Adams in the name of protecting national security to counter France's alleged attempts to bring the United States into war against England in the context of the military conflicts between Paris and London.
With the civil war (1861-1865) the problem of the discrepancy between freedom of the press and national security, this time in less specious terms than those Adams had advanced over half a century earlier.
Union newspapers had no qualms about reporting on troop deployments, jeopardizing military operations, nor about presenting readers with lists of the numerous Union soldiers who had died. This ultimately fueled defeatism and facilitated criticism of Republican President Abraham Lincoln's conduct of the war. The War Department, therefore, began censoring telegraph information from the front and closed down some newspapers.
Lincoln himself personally ordered the suspension of publication of the “New York Journal of Comerce and Gazette" he was born in "New York World” when in 1864 they had echoed the extremely unpopular fake news that the president was about to call up 400.000 men.
Relations between the presidency and the press became heated again at the beginning of the Democrat's second term. Grover Cleveland.
The White House occupant underwent surgery for palate cancer in great secrecy, fearing that making the disease public would undermine his political authority: he would be considered almost dead, as the survival rate for cancer at the time was minimal.
When a reporter, Elisha Jay Edwards, published the news a few weeks after the intervention, Cleveland not only denied it, but attacked him on a personal and professional level, in tones that anticipated those that Trump would resort to more than a century later, going so far as to call him "a disgrace to journalism".
The early twentieth century
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the president Theodore Roosevelt, who also posed as a reformist during his time in the White House from 1901 to 1909, dubbed the architects of the early forms of investigative journalism who had conducted investigations into political corruption and collusion between big business and legislators as “manure rakers.”
Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), despite being the first president to appoint a press secretary and to call periodic press conferences, detested journalists due to his intellectual background and his past role as a professor at Princeton University.
With the United States' entry into World War I on April 6, 1917, Wilson employed a dedicated federal agency, the Committee on Public Information, and a brilliant journalist, George Creel, to sway public opinion toward intervention in the conflict. At the same time, however, he requested and obtained from Congress new measures to muzzle the press and stifle neutralist dissent.
The combined provisions of a new Sedition Act, enacted in 1917, and the Espionage Act of 1918 they effectively introduced crimes of opinion with regard to contesting US participation in the war.
In application of the second legislative measure, the socialist periodical “The Masses" was excluded from the postal service on charges of encouraging pacifism and wartime draft evasion. Since the monthly magazine was distributed primarily by mail, the measure led to its cessation.
In 1919, with the ruling on case Schenck v. United States, the Supreme Court recognized the constitutionality of the two laws based on the doctrine of “clear and present danger,” according to which it was legitimate to limit the freedom of the press and speech, protected by the First Amendment, in situations where national security was threatened by a “clear and present danger.”
Richard M. Nixon
If Wilson had despised journalists, the Republican president Richard M. Nixon He literally came to hate them. His paranoia led him to blame the media for all his political failures, starting with his defeat against the Democrats. John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the 1960 White House election.
His, therefore, was a radical aversion that pre-existed his presidential mandates (1969-1974).
For example, after losing the 1962 California governorship election, he concluded a meeting with a hundred journalists in which he acknowledged the victory of his challenger, the Democrat pat brown, exclaiming angrily: “you will no longer have a Nixon to kick around because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
In mid-1971, Chuck Colson, one of the White House advisers, prepared a list of 220 people and organizations, considered hostile to Nixon, against whom theInternal Revenue Service, the US version of the Internal Revenue Service, looking for any tax law violations that could derail their careers or force them to cease their activities.
More than a quarter of the names on the list were journalists, to which were added the "New York Times", The"St. Louis Post-Dispatch" and the "Washington Post”, as well as the owner of the latter newspaper, Katharine Graham.
Lo Nixon's clash with the press it didn't happen much in relation to the infamous Watergate case, the break-in at the national headquarters of the Democratic Party to obtain information useful to help Nixon in the 1972 campaign for re-election to the White House.
Two chroniclers of the “Washington Post", Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, They helped spark the scandal by exposing Nixon's attempt to cover up the FBI investigation. However, it was not their reporting, but the congressional and judicial inquiries that led to Nixon's resignation in 1974.
Nixon's real conflict with the media had previously taken place over the issue of Pentagon Papers, 47 volumes of Department of Defense documents that demonstrated how the federal government had systematically lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the Vietnam War.
A former Pentagon military analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, had 43 of the 47 volumes examined by a journalist of the “New York Times”, Neil Sheehan, who photocopied them without his consent, and the newspaper began publishing their contents on June 13, 1971.
The federal administration sought an injunction to prevent the release of further material, citing security and national interest reasons and invoking theEspionage Act which was still in force and prohibited the disclosure of sensitive information that could harm the United States and benefit Washington's enemies.
But when the legal dispute reached the Supreme Court, a majority of the justices ruled in favor of freedom of the press, allowing journalists of the “New York Times” and subsequently of the “Washington Post” to continue writing articles based on the approximately 7.000 pages of the Pentagon Papers.
La The ruling did not establish the unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act, but it still involved a Nixon's clear defeat in his effort to bring the media under the control of the federal government.
Harry S. Truman and Barack Obama
After Cleveland and Wilson, other Democratic presidents had a terrible relationship with the press. In 1950, after Paul Hume, the music critic of the “Washington Post"had trashed a concert by the soprano Margaret truman, his father, the democrat Harry S. Truman, wrote him an indignant letter threatening to break his nose if he ever met him in person.
Subsequently, tensions between the Democratic White House residents and journalists did not remain confined to personal or family matters, but above all took on political implications.
In particular, Barack Obama had a very tense relationship with the conservative television network Fox News, who attacked him especially on the health care reform project. The Democratic president gave Fox News correspondents few opportunities to ask questions during White House press conferences and limited the number of interviews his administration officials granted to the television network.
Obama himself boycotted Fox News, systematically refusing invitations to participate in the channel's flagship program, Fox News Sunday, conducted by Chris Wallace from September 2009 to April 2016, thus for almost the entire duration of his presidency.
In 2010, in a conversation with the magazine “Rolling Stone", to try to delegitimize the activity of the Fox News As a news outlet, Obama accused her of lacking objectivity and went so far as to claim that her actions were “destructive” to the growth of the United States.
According to "Washington Post”, to identify the source from the State Department who had leaked sensitive information to the media about the North Korea, the Justice Department would have even gone so far as to obtain a warrant to access the email of a journalist of the Fox News (Ann E. Marimow, A Rare Pick into a Justice Department Leak Probe, May 19, 2013).
Le legal actions taken against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, described in 2010 by then-Vice President Joe Biden as a “high-tech terrorist,” responsible for the release of confidential reports from American diplomatic personnel and classified documents on US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly concerning the killing of civilians mistaken for terrorists and insurgents, attested to the efforts also made by the Obama administration to thwart freedom of information, once again hiding behind the defense of national security.
The “do-it-yourself” media
Compared to their own predecessors in the Oval Office, Trump once again addressed the issue of his relationship with the media in his own way.
After the suspension of his Twitter account (today X), after theincitement to the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, the tycoon responded by launching a personal social network, Truth Social, on February 21.
Now, frustrated by the coverage he received from the press and television networks, he has created the Trump TV, A 24-hour streaming platform broadcasting the supposed successes that The Donald himself attributes to his administration. The initiative is a new expression of Trump's tendency to invent parallel realities under his absolute control.
He also acted in this way in the diplomatic field with the formation of the Board of Peace, a sort of international organization alternative to the United Nations.
In the very short term the Trump TV aims to bring votes to Republican candidates in the midterm elections next November 3, with the intent of averting the presumable victory of the Democratic Party.
However, this seems like a rather unrealistic attempt, because it is very likely that, apart from a few curious onlookers, those connecting to the platform will be almost exclusively the tycoon's die-hard supporters who would have voted Republican anyway in just over a month.
However, the underlying problem remains, represented by the Trump's attacks on press freedom to whom the only embankment, at the moment, remains the federal judiciary.
. . .
Stefano Luconi
He teaches US History in the Department of Historical, Geographical, and Ancient Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include The “Indispensable Nation.” A History of the United States from the Colonies to Trump's Second Presidency (2026), US Institutions from the Drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022), The Black Soul of the United States. African Americans and the Difficult Path to Equality, 1619–2023 (2023). The Race for the White House 2024. The Election of the President of the United States from the Primaries to Beyond the November 5th Vote (2024).
