Six Americans sued President Donald Trump in federal court in New York on Monday, arguing that his administration's policy of shutting news organizations out of the White House over coverage he considers false or unfavorable violates the public's own First Amendment right to independent reporting about its government — not only the rights of the journalists shut out.
The case, Roth v. Trump, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. It names Trump, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Communications Director Steven Cheung and Secret Service Director Sean Curran as defendants, and asks the court to declare the access policy unconstitutional and to bar the administration from enforcing viewpoint-based restrictions against any news organization covering the White House.
The six plaintiffs are citizens, not media companies. They are Kenneth Roth, the former longtime head of Human Rights Watch who now lectures at Yale; Daniel Froomkin, a political journalist and editor of Press Watch; Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare; Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Yale; Peter Schmidt-Nowara, a civics teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School in New York City; and Ethan Young, a University of Pennsylvania student and editor-in-chief of its student newspaper. All six say they depend on a varied and independent White House press corps for their teaching, scholarship, journalism and public advocacy.
"I joined this lawsuit because my students deserve to know what's happening in their government and to hear from a free and independent press," Schmidt-Nowara says in the complaint.
The policy under challenge is the administration's practice of restricting news organizations it accuses of unfair coverage. The Associated Press was barred from the Oval Office, Air Force One and some events after it declined to adopt Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. In September, the White House banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico outright: reporters' hard-pass credentials were deactivated or confiscated after Trump announced the move against coverage he called persistently false and negative. The new complaint says restrictions have also involved those four outlets and that other organizations have been threatened with the same treatment.
The courts have already pushed back once. On October 13, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly issued a preliminary injunction in the three outlets' own case, ruling that the ban violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights and blocking the administration from barring them from White House press facilities while that case proceeds. The dispute has not ended there: the White House still keeps banned outlets out of the presidential press pool — the small rotating group of reporters who cover Trump in tight spaces such as the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One — and CNN has threatened further legal action after being denied pool opportunities.
The new plaintiffs argue the harm runs wider than the outlets already punished. "Defendants' policy of restricting the access of disfavored news organizations deprives the public of the reporting of those organizations, and it inevitably deprives them of the independent reporting of other news organizations as well," the complaint says, arguing that every journalist still inside must now weigh whether a critical word about the president could cost them their access. "The ultimate injury here is to the democratic public," the suit says. Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight Institute, said: "The First Amendment protects the public's right to know what its government is doing. The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting."
The White House answered that access to the president's workplace is not something any outlet can claim as a right. "No person may demand access to the Oval Office," a White House official said, adding that news organizations the administration accuses of spreading misinformation and defamation can still report from outside the building. That is the core of the administration's position: a place inside the White House is a privilege the president may grant or withdraw, and its target is false reporting, not the press itself. Announcing the September ban, Trump put it this way: "The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS."
No court has ruled on the new lawsuit. It is the first of these challenges brought by readers, teachers and journalists as consumers of the news rather than by the outlets themselves, and it puts the largest question in the fight to a judge: whether a president may use the keys to the White House as leverage over how he is covered. If the six win the broad injunction they are seeking, the protection would extend to the entire White House press corps, not just the organizations already banned.
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