The Media Shouldn’t Whine to the Courts

NEW YORK—I don’t like it when newspapers or TV networks go whining to the courts.

And it’s for a very selfish reason.

The media in this country has the best deal on the planet:

Once we print something, or broadcast something, you can’t touch us. We don’t have any of those weird “government secrets” laws they have in England, or the hate-speech stuff they have in Germany (if you deny the Holocaust you can go to jail), much less the kind of byzantine press rules they have in repressive countries like Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Every time the government has tried to stop the media—the Pentagon Papers, the Progressive article about how to build a hydrogen bomb—the government has lost.

So the other end of that deal is that we don’t ask for help. We don’t ask the government to keep track of us and we don’t want the government to keep track of us. You don’t need a special ID card to be a member of the working press, as you do in other countries. You don’t need to be approved by some bureaucrat to start raising hell in print. Progressivism: A Prime... James Ostrowski Best Price: $8.99 Buy New $10.95 (as of 08:30 UTC - Details)

That’s why CNN should have just dropped it when the White House revoked Jim Acosta’s press pass. By literally making a federal case out of it, they encourage the idea that the press is governed by a set of rules that can be enforced by a judge.

I don’t want judges thinking they can make any rules about us!

I don’t even want judges thinking they can enforce “unwritten rules”—because that’s what it was in this case.

Obviously the White House can approve and deny press credentials. The press room is only so big. If you let everybody in, then you would have to give press passes to podcasters in East Lansing, Michigan, who have fifteen listeners per week. The White House gets to decide who gets in and who doesn’t. That’s the way it’s always been.

Everybody who’s ever worked for any media organization has been kicked out by someone or denied access by someone or been stonewalled by someone, usually for a sneaky reason. What do you do when that happens? You buck up and get the story some other way. You surround the stonewaller with aggressive reporting. You don’t file a frigging lawsuit to get your press pass back.

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