US President Donald Trump’s move to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists from the White House has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
Trump had announced he was banning the outlets late last week, declaring their reporting to be “fake news”.
The media organisations argued they had been singled out because of the content of their coverage – in other words, viewpoint discrimination – and called the ban a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment.
In an order, US District Judge Timothy Kelly said the outlets had met the legal thresholds to obtain a temporary restraining order, in effect for 14 days.
He said they were likely to succeed in showing that their White House press passes were revoked without due process. “This is a high bar, but Plaintiffs have met it,” he wrote.
The judge described letters that the White House sent the outlets days after banning their reporters to outline objectionable reporting as “so vague it hardly does the trick”.
Kelly, who was nominated by Trump in 2017 and ordered a CNN journalist’s access be restored in a similar case in 2018, heard arguments on Wednesday and ended the hearing without ruling.
Temporary restraining orders are typically designed to preserve the status quo pending a closer review of the case by the court.
Kelly said his decision must be guided by prior rulings in comparable First Amendment cases, even if the government disagrees with them.
His decision noted that the White House argued that previous cases cited had been wrongly decided.
Theodore Boutrous Jr., the attorney for the outlets, argued about the urgent need for a change, saying there had been irreparable harm to the organisations at a time of momentous news events.
“We’re at war. We have world leaders coming to Washington,” he said, referencing the conflict in Iran and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival in the US.
Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik reiterated the administration’s point that the president had the right to choose who gets into the White House, calling the access “a privilege, not a right”.
In arguing that Trump was not engaging in viewpoint discrimination, Velchik said the president had also criticised other news organisations even more harshly, such as calling ABC “the worst”, but they had not been banned.
“The president should be able to take immediate action to protect national security,” Velchik told the court.
In response, Boutrous said, “suddenly it’s a national security case,” arguing that the president brought up that point only after the lawsuit was filed.
Trump “keeps proving our point,” Boutrous said, describing how the president has consistently used negative coverage of him as justification for the ban.
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