Editorial | Trump is a danger to the First Amendment

On the Friday before St. Patrick’s Day weekend, Donald Trump went on another tirade against the mainstream media, calling out the largest news outlets for journalistic malpractice with no evidence to support it.

“The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and MSDNC, and the fake news, CNN and ABC, CBS and NBC, they’ll write whatever they say,” Trump ranted. “It’s totally illegal what they do.”

This comes only weeks after Trump’s administration announced that the White House itself would control the press pool, which is the selection of journalists who may cover the president in settings with limited space.

Until now, the White House Correspondents Association — an independent organization of journalists — decided the press pool, ensuring an unbiased and nonpartisan selection of news outlets in the pool. But with the new announcement, the White House press team will be able to hand-pick who they want to cover the president’s activities.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, assured reporters that “legacy media outlets” would still be included in the press pool, but with Trump’s track record of statements about these outlets — the “fake news” and “lamestream” media — along with his rant on Friday, that assurance may not mean much.

Trump, though he has dubbed himself and his protégé Elon Musk as the last line of defense against freedom of speech, is the greatest threat to our First Amendment rights. 

You are welcome to think what you may about mainstream media outlets, and you should apply a critical eye to recognize biases in your news. But sowing distrust of nearly every large newsroom that is not decidedly right-wing — Fox News was notably not included in Trump’s list of “fake news” outlets — is not in the spirit of freedom of the press.

The people deserve to consume news from a wide variety of sources — including the largest and most popular conglomerates — and even suggesting that covering news could be “illegal” without basis is a very dangerous thing for a president to say. The First Amendment is not just the right to say anything you want on Twitter — in fact, it’s not that at all — but it’s the right for our press, small and legacy outlets alike, to not be censored in law or in practice by the federal government. 

As student journalists, we stand for an independently organized press pool, a reasonable public trust in our news sources and a country that defends and stands behind freedom of the press.

The Pitt News editorial is a weekly article written by the opinions editors in collaboration with all other desk editors. It reflects the collective opinion of the current Pitt News editorial staff.