A Right We Cannot Name

Freedom of the press is not a privilege granted to journalists. It is the public's right to witness power.

Three days after a national survey found that fewer than one in three Americans could identify freedom of the press as a First Amendment right, President Donald Trump announced that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico would be barred from the White House. The decision followed no particular breach of security or professional conduct. It was the cumulative result of reporting he considered false and unfair.

Explaining the decision, the President said, "I don't have to let them into my, into the people's house."

The correction matters.

Years before COVID-19 shook the world, I helped professors in my master's program design and teach a semester-long pandemic response exercise. We drew from the 1918 pandemic, turning its political debates, organized resistance, and public health interventions into scenarios about the impossible choices that emerge when limited knowledge, frightened populations, and consequential decisions collide.

During COVID-19, I often thought back to those lessons. Much of what we had studied returned with unsettling familiarity. So did the complicated role of the press.

Journalists sometimes provided essential information and forced public institutions to explain themselves. They also made difficult work harder. Changes in scientific understanding were presented as fecklessness. Dangerous claims were sanitized through repetition. Unproven treatments were amplified alongside developing medical judgment as though every assertion deserved equal standing.

At one vaccination point of dispensing, members of the press attempted to film where people were receiving medical care. Those patients had every right to expect as much privacy as an emergency operation could reasonably provide. They did not need a camera recording the moment a needle entered their arm.

Public health workers who had come to serve patients had to step away from the operation. They placed themselves between the camera and the people receiving care. They explained, redirected, coordinated with law enforcement, and tried to move the press toward trusted sources of information. They had to remain diplomatic, empathetic, and conciliatory while still being firm. All the while, a hard-nosed journalist could misinterpret every word and gesture, turning the act of protecting a patient's privacy into apparent evidence that government had something to hide.

It was exhausting to experience and horrifying to watch. Encounters like it were among the many pressures that wore down the public health workforce during and after the pandemic. People trained to protect the public found themselves absorbing suspicion, hostility, and personal threat simply for doing the work.

Restricting the camera inside that clinical space was appropriate. The restriction protected the patient, not the institution. But protecting patients from a camera is not the same as protecting government from observation.

The public health response nevertheless remained subject to intense scrutiny. Reporters gathered outside vaccination sites, offices, and government meetings. Some helped people understand what was happening. Some inflamed the confusion. The public still retained the right to observe what its government was doing in its name.

That right becomes more important, not less, as power increases.

If constrained state and local public servants must remain answerable while navigating an unprecedented emergency, the most powerful office in the country cannot demand less scrutiny for itself. Every presidential statement can move markets, alter alliances, begin an investigation, or instigate another act of war. The public has a profound interest in knowing the mind, conduct, and intentions of the government acting on its behalf.

The press belongs in the people's house. The people's house. It is temporarily occupied by an officeholder and administration that will eventually be gone. What they do while occupying it will remain.

This does not require us to pretend that journalists are a priestly class without biases, ambitions, or failures. A new Pew Research Center survey captures the public's understandable ambivalence. Seventy-three percent of Americans say press freedom is highly important to society, yet 53 percent say preventing inaccurate reporting is more important than preserving press freedom when the two conflict.

Inaccurate reporting can cause real harm. The harder question is who receives the power to decide what may be reported. Government cannot serve as a neutral referee over reporting about itself. The President's accusation of "fake news" is not an independent finding of fact. It is the judgment of the person being scrutinized.

There are legitimate security, privacy, and logistical limits on press access, just as there were legitimate limits inside that vaccination site. A restriction that protects the public is different from one that protects an officeholder from criticism. One preserves the boundary between competing rights. The other converts public access into a reward for favorable treatment.

Stewardship requires more than using power toward ends we consider good. It requires accepting restraints that may sometimes feel unfair, inconvenient, or even hostile. The test is not whether an officeholder tolerates scrutiny he considers justified. The test is whether he remains bound by the public's rights when he believes the scrutiny is wrong.

We do not protect the press because every journalist uses that freedom responsibly. We protect it because no vast population can personally observe everything done in its name. Journalists serve as imperfect eyes and ears for a public that possesses the underlying right to know.

A right we defend only when exercised by people we respect is not a right. It is permission.

The people's house does not need a guest list based on favor. It needs witnesses.