6 citizens sue Trump, saying media ban deprives them of news as audience stakeholders

In the increasingly bitter legal standoff between President Donald Trump and media outlets whose reporting he dislikes, a new and crucial third party has emerged: citizens who watch and read the news and need it to do their jobs. A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of six such citizens — effectively representing the audiences for the news media — argues that it’s not only the rights of news organizations that are violated when Trump bans them from White House premises. Even more fundamentally, the lawsuit argues, such bans violate the public’s right to independent reporting about its president and government.

“The ultimate injury here … is to the democratic public,” says the suit, filed in federal district court in New York against Trump and three key aides, including the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. “The First Amendment protects the public’s right to know what its government is doing,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the six plaintiffs, along with the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. “The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting,” Fallow said in a statement.

“When the White House expels reporters because of their coverage and threatens others with expulsion, it isn’t just the press that suffers — the public loses access to independent reporting and gets something closer to government propaganda.” The plaintiffs all rely on White House news for their work The six plaintiffs are all people who say they rely on independent and diverse White House reporting for their teaching, journalism or advocacy. They include a noted human rights advocate, a political journalist, a Yale history professor, a high school civics teacher, a legal journalist, and a student journalist at the University of Pennsylvania. The complaint filed Monday recounts how various news organizations that have been targeted by Trump are already battling the administration in the courts.

These cases include the current lawsuit by CNN, MS NOW and Politico, whose journalists were banished from the White House in September. A ederal judge recently extended an order preventing the White House from enforcing the ban while the case makes its way through the legal system. Still affected, though, is CNN’s pool coverage of Tr…

Still affected, though, is CNN’s pool coverage of Trump.