How long will it be before I can no longer write opinion pieces about the Trump administration because I won’t have sufficient evidence to do so? How long before the veil separating the general public from the White House becomes so thick that no one but Trump’s inner circle knows what’s going on? How long before routine White House reporting becomes speculation at best?
If the glaring signs I’m writing about are of any indication, not very long at all.
On Feb. 7, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instituted a new “media rotation program” that meant longstanding news outlets, including CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, were being expelled from their Pentagon offices. In their place, newly invited outlets such as One America News (OAN), Breitbart, and Newsmax were given access.
While their conservative views are not inherently problematic, the issue arises when these outlets, closely aligned with Trump, become the sole sources of information, ensuring that no unfavorable coverage of the administration’s actions can be published. Not every Republican outlet is explicitly pro-Trump. There are conservative publications that could provide reasonably unbiased coverage of this administration, but it is becoming increasingly clear that this will not be the case.
On Feb. 21, the Associated Press sued several Trump Administration officials over restricted press access to White House briefings and government information. In their case, they cited their First Amendment rights to freedom of the press, arguing that the administration was deliberately obstructing independent journalism to control the narrative. The White House announced on Tuesday that it would break decades of precedent and begin handpicking which reporters are allowed to cover White House events.
But this is about more than handpicking reporters—it’s about handpicking coverage, and exerting ultimate control over every word published from the White House press room. It’s about eroding the credibility of neutral and bipartisan reporting, while forcing Americans to rely on administration-approved sources for firsthand information.
Trump wants us in the dark. He wants dissenters and critics to argue from a place of uncertainty so that he can simply discredit them as uninformed. Investigative reporting is getting obstructed until public discourse will be reduced to little more than guesswork, leaving the general public ignorant to the truth.
It is clear that Trump is building a wall—not just at the border, but between his administration and the public. His tactics bear a striking resemblance to those of former-President Richard Nixon, whose secrecy aimed to hide the truth of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War from the public.
If Trump’s actions mirror Nixon’s, then the AP’s lawsuit mirrors the fight of The New York Times in 1971, when they took the Nixon administration to the Supreme Court over their right to publish the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page document exposing the horrifying scope of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the Times was pivotal in holding Nixon accountable and shaping our understanding of the Vietnam War today. Without the publication of the Pentagon Papers, we might still believe that the thousands of Vietnam War activists who were arrested, injured, or even killed—like the four students at a Kent State University protest in 1970—were on the wrong side of history.
If the next four years are not covered in a truthful manner, we risk believing and perpetuating misinformation for years to come, long beyond this administration. Trump has threatened Maine Governor Janet Mills with cuts of federal funding if she does not comply with his ban on transgender women competing on women’s sports teams. He has pressured the AP to update its style guide to refer to the “Gulf of America” rather than the “Gulf of Mexico,” threatening their access to the White House if they don’t comply.
We cannot respond to these unconstitutional threats with silence. Regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome, the AP is setting an example. We must take him to court. We must fight for our right not just to speak, but to know; to know what our own president is doing, so that we don’t have to be force fed a pro-Trump narrative at every turn. As the AP stated in its lawsuit, “the press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government.”
Let’s make sure it stays that way.
