On Wednesday, White House staff informed a CNN White House reporter, Kaitlan Collins, that she was not permitted to attend an open press availability at the White House with President Donald Trump and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Her offense? While working as the press pool reporter (a small group of reporters who share information with the wider press corps), Collins didn’t ask questions pertaining to the Trump-Juncker meeting but about Vladimir Putin and the president’s former attorney, Michael Cohen. When the White House later announced the Trump-Juncker availability, Collins was told she wasn’t invited.
The president’s well-known hostility to CNN has intensified in recent days. Last month he refused to take a question from the network’s reporter in London, and the New York Times recently obtained a White House email that mentioned Trump’s anger at finding an Air Force One television tuned to CNN.
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered the White House’s version of the kerfuffle: “At the conclusion of a press event in the Oval Office a reporter shouted questions and refused to leave despite repeatedly being asked to do so. Subsequently, our staff informed her she was not welcome to participate in the next event, but made clear that any other journalist from her network could attend.” According to other reporters in the press pool, Collins spoke neither disrespectfully nor loudly.
Banning a reporter from an open-press White House event is virtually unheard of. We can recall only one—Robert Sherrill, correspondent for the Nation, who was denied a security clearance by Secret Service during the Johnson administration because he had once punched the press secretary for the governor of Florida. Probably LBJ just didn’t want him around. Before and since then, presidents of both parties have suffered not just hostile reporters but crackpots and weirdos attending White House press events.
We have not seen video of the disputed press pool encounter, but we don’t need to. Collins’s allegedly “disrespectful” questions weren’t the reason for her disinvitation. The reason was her employer, CNN, which the president regards not merely as untrustworthy or hostile but as deeply sinister. It’s true that Barack Obama regarded Fox News with open contempt, and that in one instance his staff attempted to exclude FNC from a press availability with a Treasury official. Fox News anchor Bret Baier remembers it well, and remembers also that other networks—including CNN—refused to attend the availability unless Fox was included. Baier on Wednesday expressed vocal opposition to the exclusion of CNN.
But Obama’s disdain doesn’t compare with Trump’s abhorrence of CNN. It’s true that CNN programming—from the early morning straight through primetime—is often hostile to Trump. And some of its reporters and anchors—Jim Acosta and Chris Cuomo, in particular—have become caricatures of the kinds of unthinking bias that contributes to the widespread distrust of the mainstream media. But Trump’s obsession with CNN is irrational and his constant and frequently personal attacks on the organization and its employees are regrettable. Every elected official gets some bad press. No one in the world receives more critical scrutiny than an American president. This is true particularly if the American president makes a habit saying things that are either demonstrably false or deliberately provocative—sometimes both. It’s paranoid and puerile to treat one media organization as uniquely guilty of all that’s wrong with society.
On Tuesday, the president of Fox News, Jay Wallace, said in a statement: “We stand in strong solidarity with CNN for the right to full access for our journalists as part of a free and unfettered press.” We’re glad he said it. We do, too.
