I run a one-person newsroom out of Fishers. No lawyers on retainer, no network behind me. If the mayor’s office, the Hamilton Southeastern school board or a state legislator ever decided LarryInFishers had written one story too many and quietly took me off the list, I would have almost no leverage beyond saying so out loud.
That is why the fight over First Amendment press access in Washington this weekend matters here.
On Friday, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was “banning” CNN, MS NOW (the former MSNBC) and Politico from the White House, accusing them of reporting “FICTION and LIES.” Saturday morning, it stopped being a social media post. MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner was asked to hand over her badge; a Secret Service officer told her it had been disabled and that the decision was “above him.” CNN’s Betsy Klein, who has covered the building since the Obama administration, found her credential deactivated. Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett was turned away at the gate.
Trump pointed to no specific story. He said he was “tired of reading and seeing fake news,” and told a reporter in the room, “I dislike dishonest press, like you. I think you’re terrible.”
That is the whole case, and it is exactly why the ban fails.
The law is not new
The controlling authority is nearly 50 years old and comes from the federal appeals court in Washington. In Sherrill v. Knight (1977), the D.C. Circuit held that once the White House opens its press facilities to reporters generally, it cannot deny a journalist access “arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” A reporter who is shut out is entitled to notice of the factual basis, a chance to respond and a written statement of reasons.
Courts have enforced it. In November 2018, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly — a Trump appointee — ordered the White House to restore CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass on due process grounds. In 2020, the D.C. Circuit upheld an injunction blocking the suspension of Playboy correspondent Brian Karem’s credential, ruling the White House “may not rely on unarticulated standards of professionalism” to justify pulling a pass.
Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told CNN’s Brian Stelter the current ban is “flatly unconstitutional” and “textbook viewpoint discrimination.” The criticism is not partisan. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, a frequent Trump defender and Fox News contributor, wrote on X that “barring disfavored media from the White House is a terrible precedent and practice.”
Indiana already ran this experiment
Hoosiers have seen a smaller version. On Oct. 14, 2021, Attorney General Todd Rokita’s office refused to let Abdul-Hakim Shabazz into a Statehouse news conference. Shabazz is an attorney and a journalist who has covered Indiana politics for roughly two decades — he publishes Indy Politics, writes columns and has been a familiar voice on Indianapolis radio. He had RSVP’d. Rokita’s office said the event was for “actual journalists,” not “gossip columnists,” pointing to the tongue-in-cheek disclaimer on Shabazz’s newsletter.
The ACLU of Indiana sued on Feb. 7, 2022. Rokita’s lawyers moved to dismiss, arguing there is no constitutional right to attend a government news conference in person, that a livestream was good enough, and that the Supreme Court “has never recognized a constitutional obligation for a government official to disclose government-held information, to respond to a particular reporter in a press conference, or to otherwise interact with the media.”
That argument was never tested. On March 28, 2022, Rokita settled and agreed to let Shabazz attend his news conferences on the same footing as every other reporter. Indiana’s attorney general folded, and folded fast, because the position was not a winner.
The strongest argument on the other side
The administration’s best card is Associated Press v. Budowich. After the AP kept using “Gulf of Mexico,” the White House cut it out of pool events. On June 6, 2025, a divided D.C. Circuit panel let the administration keep the AP out of the Oval Office and Air Force One while the case proceeded, reasoning those are not spaces the government has opened to the press generally. Judge Cornelia Pillard dissented.
But look at what that panel did not do. It left the AP’s East Room access alone. It drew a line around a few small, physically limited rooms where a rotating pool has always stood in for everyone else. Expelling three news organizations from the entire White House complex — briefing room, workspace, grounds — is not that. And the stated reason here is the coverage itself. Budowich turned on the character of the space. This turns on the content of the reporting, the one justification the First Amendment squarely forbids.
Why a Fishers reader should care
None of this requires anyone to like CNN, MS NOW or Politico, any more than defending Shabazz required agreeing with a word he wrote. The principle runs one direction: if a president can pull a credential over a story, so can a governor, an attorney general, a mayor or a school board.
Indiana’s Open Door Law and Access to Public Records Act rest on the same idea — the public’s business is done in public, and reporters are in the room as stand-ins for residents who cannot be. The day an elected official gets to hand-pick which journalists are allowed in, the information you get about your own government stops being a right and becomes a gift, revocable at will.
I would rather it stay a right.