In banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House, the Trump administration has argued that the move is similar to actions taken by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But the ban goes beyond what those presidents did.

The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Sept. 21. Photo by Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images.

In a Sept. 21 press release, three days after President Donald Trump said the news organizations would be barred “effective immediately,” the White House said that “[a]ccess changes are nothing new,” and that “Democrat Administrations have restricted, punished, and locked out the press” for “years.” The release listed several examples of incidents involving the press during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“There’s no basis to suggest that Biden and Obama ‘did it too,'” Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told us. “Trump’s action is singular and unprecedented,” he said, noting that Trump has instituted a “full ban of multiple news media” and “is targeting news organizations because they are publishing content he finds unflattering.

“That violates the First Amendment prohibition against government using its power to punish ideas,” Paulson said.

Trump announced the ban on Sept. 18 in a post on Truth Social, saying it was due to reporting what he called “FAKE NEWS.” When questioned by reporters later that day, Trump repeated that he was doing this “because they’re fake news.” He said the news organizations “purposely write negative news” in order to “try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration.”

We’ll explain what happened in some of the instances under Obama and Biden cited in the White House press release and by other Republicans. First Amendment experts told us that Trump’s ban is different.

Amy Kristin Sanders, a professor of First Amendment studies at Penn State University, told us that Trump’s action was “unprecedented,” “particularly when taken in light of President Trump’s public stance about why he banned the news organizations.”

“What the Trump Administration has done is revoke access for news organizations that have already been granted press access while publicly saying it is because President Trump doesn’t like the way he is being covered by those news organizations,” Sanders told us in an email. “These outlets are being targeted specifically because they engaged in critical coverage.”

Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defends free speech rights on college campuses and elsewhere, said, “Past presidents have limited outlets’ White House access based on hostility toward their reporting. For example, the Nixon administration, displeased with the Washington Post’s coverage of Watergate, barred one of the paper’s reporters from covering White House social events.” And the Obama administration initially excluded Fox News from a TV reporting pool for one interview (we’ll explain that incident below).

“But I don’t know of any past example of a president indefinitely banning a media outlet from the White House,” Terr told us.

The White House press release defended the president’s ban. “The First Amendment protects their right to publish; it does not entitle them to a hard pass, briefing room seat, or place in the press pool,” the release said.

Terr disagreed. “Just last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reaffirmed that when the White House opens its facilities to the press generally, it cannot exclude reporters based on disapproval of their views,” he said, calling the action a violation of the First Amendment.

CNN, Politico and MS NOW sued the administration, asking a federal judge to block enforcement of Trump’s ban and to restore their access to the White House. Administration officials responded in a court filing saying that the news organizations “have failed to maintain basic minimum ‘standards of professionalism and decorum'” by “‘publishing sensitive or classified information.'” A hearing was held Sept. 23.

In response to Trump’s action, the other major TV networks said they wouldn’t participate in pool coverage of the president’s events.

Obama and Fox News

In its press release, the White House highlighted a feud between the Obama White House and Fox News in 2009, early in Obama’s presidency. The Obama White House questioned whether Fox News was a legitimate news organization and excluded “Fox News Sunday” when the president made the rounds on all of the other Sunday news talk shows. And the Treasury Department reportedly tried to limit access for Fox News to an interview with an administration official.

“In 2009, the Obama White House attempted to exclude a Fox News reporter from an interview with an unpaid executive pay consultant for the U.S. Treasury Department. Other news organizations objected to the effort and supported Fox and it never occurred again,” Paulson told us. “Continuance of this practice would have raised significant First Amendment questions.”

In a Sept. 19 talk at Colgate University, Obama commented on Trump’s ban on certain news outlets. “I’m trying to think what would’ve happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News, you’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.” Obama didn’t kick out the network from the White House. But his administration took other actions against Fox News, and the Justice Department also surveilled one of the network’s reporters as part of aggressive measures to curtail leaks to the media.

We wrote about these actions in 2018, when Obama said he had “complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down or call them enemies of the people,” a reference to Trump repeatedly calling the media that. As we said then, Obama did more than complain. He didn’t use the phrase “enemies of the people,” though he did say that Fox News’ “point of view” was “ultimately destructive” to the U.S.

On Sept. 20, 2009, Obama appeared on the Sunday talk shows on NBC, CBS, CNN, ABC and Univision, but ignored “Fox News Sunday.” Asked about the snub, White House spokesman Josh Earnest criticized Fox for not airing Obama’s Sept. 9, 2009, joint address to Congress on healthcare. The speech did air on the Fox News Channel, however — but not the broadcast network. Obama didn’t make it to “Fox News Sunday” until his last year in office.

In October 2009, the White House ramped up its rhetoric. Anita Dunn, the White House director of communications, told the New York Times, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent” and said that “we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” When asked about Dunn’s comments, White House senior adviser David Axelrod said that “it’s not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view.” He added, “We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”

That same month, the Treasury Department reportedly tried to exclude Fox News from a pool TV interview of an administration official, Kenneth Feinberg, the so-called “pay czar.” The White House disputed that account, saying the issue was merely a miscommunication. But Fox News and other news outlets reported that the Treasury Department had tried to leave Fox News out of the pool, until the other TV networks protested. “All the networks said, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” CBS News White House correspondent Chip Reid told his own network.

Fox News did interview Feinberg.

“The Obama administration’s exclusion of Fox News from a pool was rightly condemned as an attack on press freedom,” Terr told us. “The White House also lists a couple of other examples of the Obama administration reportedly restricting or threatening to restrict reporters’ access. Of course, none of that justifies what the Trump administration is doing now. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And the Trump administration’s wrong — a directive from the top to ban three outlets from the White House indefinitely over their critical or negative reporting — appears to be unprecedented in its scope and severity.”

Obama Administration Pursuit of Leaks

The Justice Department under Obama also aggressively investigated leaks of information to the media, surveilling or subpoenaing journalists in the process, including Fox News reporter James Rosen. In 2010, the DOJ tracked Rosen’s movements at the State Department and collected his telephone and email records, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story in 2013.

In the affidavit for a search warrant to obtain emails, the FBI agent described Rosen as “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”

“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin told the Washington Post.

In 2012, the DOJ also seized two months of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press.

In 2017, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote: “Under the Obama administration, charges were brought against at least eight government employees or contractors accused of leaking information to the media, and several journalists were snared in the process through subpoenas to testify or surveillance of their records. After public outcry, the Department of Justice released revised standards for subpoenaing reporters.”

The aggressive posture against leaks, and reporters, continued under Trump’s first term and has escalated in his second. In an August report, CPJ said the DOJ in Trump’s second term had issued subpoenas involving at least 10 journalists, “marking one of the most aggressive uses of legal powers against the press in the United States in decades.” It cited the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which found that over Biden’s term three such subpoenas were issued and just one was issued in Trump’s first term.

Biden’s Stricter Criteria for White House Press Badges

Asked about Trump banning the media outlets from the White House press room, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise falsely equated Trump’s move to a situation during the Biden administration when it placed greater restrictions on those seeking a hard pass allowing access to the White House press facilities.

“Joe Biden removed the press credentials from over 400 different agencies,” Scalise said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sept. 20.

The White House parroted Scalise’s claim in its press release the following day, claiming, “The Biden Administration restricted more than 440 reporters from White House access through a new, retroactive press credentialing process — with independent and conservative journalists taking a heavy share of the hit. The White House Correspondents’ Association barely objected.”

But those claims are misleading at best.

As ABC News’ Jonathan Karl pointed out during the interview with Scalise, “The 400 individual reporters who [lost] credentials did not reapply. There was only one that was actually denied a credential. And all of those who didn’t reapply were allowed to come in.”

“They were removed,” Scalise said.

“They were not banned from the White House,” Karl said. “That did not happen.”

Here’s what did happen. In May 2023, the Biden administration established new, stricter rules for who could obtain a “hard pass” allowing routine access to the White House press areas without an escort. As the Washington Post explained at the time, in order to be eligible for a hard pass, a journalist had to be “employed full time by an organization principally concerned with news dissemination; must reside in the greater Washington, D.C., area; must have gone to the White House for work at least once during the prior six months; and must hold press credentials for either the Supreme Court, Senate or House.”

The White House at the time estimated that 40% of the journalists who had hard passes hadn’t even been to the White House in the previous 90 days.

In August of that year, Politico reported that over the first three months under the new Biden-era rules, the number of hard pass holders dropped from 1,417 to 975. Most of the drop was attributed to journalists who simply didn’t reapply. According to Politico, only one person who applied was denied a pass under the new criteria.

Importantly, though, even journalists without a hard pass could still get access to the White House press briefings by obtaining a daily pass, which required a journalist to provide personal information to clear security.

Jen Psaki, who served as White House press secretary under Biden from January 2021 to May 2022, posted a video to TikTok on Sept. 21 calling Scalise’s taking point “total BS.”

“So what the White House did was they put in place a couple of requirements that are pretty standard,” Psaki said, noting that “there were a lot of people with hard passes out there that had not used it in several years.”

“But [conservative] outlets like Breitbart and Fox and OAN and Newsmax all got hard passes because the criteria had nothing to do with how you were covering the administration,” Psaki said. “It was whether you were meeting those basic standard requirements, which is very much aligned with what the Senate and the House requires as well.”

Reporters who did not regularly cover the White House could still get access to White House press briefings “simply by getting day passes, and that is something that the Biden White House granted to a huge number of people from a range of news outlets,” Psaki said. “None were prevented from getting access to the White House because of their coverage. That is a big difference between then and what’s happening now.”

After his “This Week” interview, Scalise pushed back on X on Karl’s live fact-check.

“This morning, ABC tried to claim the Biden White House didn’t cut off press access for over 400 journalists,” Scalise wrote. “The facts say otherwise.”

He cited a Fox News story in August 2023 that claimed, “More than 440 reporters lose press passes after White House changes requirements.”

The White House correspondent for Today News Africa filed a lawsuit claiming the Biden administration discriminated against him by changing the criteria. However, a D.C. District Court judge ruled in favor of the White House, saying the criteria established by the Biden White House for hard pass credentials was “facially reasonable” and “viewpoint neutral.” As a result, the judge noted, passes were not denied based on the content of stories produced by applicants.

In Trump’s case, Sanders, the Penn State professor, told us, “These outlets are being targeted specifically because they engaged in critical coverage.”

“The Biden administration did change the credentialing requirements for ‘hard pass’ access, causing some journalists not to renew their hard passes and possibly making some journalists ineligible for a hard pass,” Sanders said. “This is different than excluding members of the WHCA from pool coverage based on the viewpoints they express in their journalism.”

The Free Speech Center’s Paulson likened the Biden rules “to a public library requiring patrons to prove residency before renewing a library card. There were no First Amendment issues.”

Terr, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that “there were legitimate concerns about the new rules, including that they disadvantaged smaller outlets and freelancers. The rules also gave the administration discretion to discipline journalists who didn’t act in a ‘professional manner,’ a vague and subjective standard that could be abused to punish aggressive questioning.”

However, Terr said, the Biden administration “used viewpoint-neutral criteria to determine access” and “didn’t go so far as to ban any outlet from the White House over unfavorable coverage.”

Other Instances of Press Access

The White House press release highlighted several other instances of reporters not getting access to certain events.

Boston Herald

The White House said that Obama press officials had raised the issue of fairness when denying the Boston Herald full access to a May 2011 fundraising event.

“Obama White House officials restricted the Boston Herald from coverage — writing that pool slots depended on covering Obama ‘fairly’ — after the paper ran a front page Mitt Romney op-ed,” the White House press release said. 

The Herald reported that Matt Lehrich, an Obama White House spokesperson, told the newspaper that the Herald’s request was denied because the White House Correspondents’ Association had already granted local pool coverage to the Herald’s competitor, the Boston Globe. However, Lehrich did suggest that covering Obama “regularly” and “fairly” were factors in which outlets are selected for press pool assignments.

“I tend to consider the degree to which papers have demonstrated to covering the White House regularly and fairly in determining local pool reporters,” the Herald said Lehrich wrote when replying to the Herald’s request for full access to the fundraiser.

In emails with the Herald, Lehrich had brought up the newspaper publishing a front-page editorial critical of Obama that was written by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama’s eventual Republican presidential opponent, in March 2011. “My point about the op-ed was not that you ran it but that it was the full front page, which excluded any coverage of the visit of a sitting US President to Boston. I think that raises a fair question about whether the paper is unbiased in its coverage of the President’s visits,” the Herald said Lehrich wrote. 

But “Lehrich insisted the Herald may yet be allowed into Obama events,” the Herald said.

San Francisco Chronicle

The White House press release also accurately recounted a conflict between the Obama White House and the San Francisco Chronicle in April 2011. However, the former Chronicle reporter involved said that what happened then is “very different” from what Trump is doing now.

“After a San Francisco Chronicle reporter recorded protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser, White House officials threatened to strip the outlet from access and warned of retaliation if the paper reported on it,” the White House press release said.

“That’s true,” Carla Marinucci, the Chronicle’s former senior political writer, told the Chronicle for a Sept. 21 story about the incident. She said Obama’s press aides “went insane” on the Chronicle after she posted a video she recorded of the protest, which the press team argued violated pool protocol because the event coverage was limited to print reporters. As a result of the dustup, Marinucci said the Obama White House “blocked us from the local press pool for a year.”

But Marinucci said what Obama’s press aides did is not on the same level as what Trump has done.

“They never accused us of posting fake news. They just didn’t want us to post a video,” Marinucci told the Chronicle. “That’s very different from saying these organizations are fake news and I don’t like what they are doing.”

She called Trump’s actions against the three news organizations a “complete violation of the First Amendment.” 

Obama’s 2008 Campaign

The White House press release also said, “In the Obama campaign’s final days, senior campaign officials pulled reporters from three prominent outlets off the traveling press plane — restricting them from coverage after the papers endorsed Obama’s opponent.” The news outlets affected disagreed on whether the endorsements, which came from the editorial pages, played a role. 

With three days to go before the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign removed journalists with the Washington Times, New York Post and Dallas Morning News from the pool of reporters traveling on Obama’s campaign plane. The campaign said that a lack of seats and high demand necessitated making some changes. Some of the newspapers affected said the move appeared to be retaliation for their individual editorial boards endorsing Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain.

“This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth,” John Solomon, then the executive editor of the Washington Times, said at the time.

However, Ryan Rusak, the politics editor at the Dallas Morning News, wrote that the paper didn’t have evidence the endorsement was the reason. “We think the Obama campaign’s decision is to some degree more a function of limited seats,” he wrote on the paper’s website, noting that he and the political reporter “had absolutely no input or knowledge of the endorsement.”

Rusak said an Obama campaign spokeswoman, Linda Douglass, told the paper the campaign needed space for Obama’s wife, Michelle, and her staff and Secret Service, and the endorsement didn’t play a role. “There are news organizations, as you look around you on the plane, whose editorial boards are never friendly to Senator Obama,” Douglass said. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal were still on the plane, Rusak said.

New York Post

Biden’s White House, the Trump administration’s press release said, “blocked New York Post reporter Steven Nelson from covering the President’s only daytime public event — despite empty seats in the room — after the reporter pressed Biden on his family’s shady business dealings.”

That’s a reference to a decision Biden officials made in May 2023 to exclude Nelson from the press covering an event featuring Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The Biden White House said Nelson was one of about two dozen reporters it could not accommodate due to a lack of space. But the New York Post said it suspected Nelson had been denied a press spot at the event because he had previously questioned Biden about the Biden family’s alleged dealings with foreign countries and the press staff didn’t want the president to face tough questions..

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As Democrats release a flurry of midterm ads portraying GOP cuts to Medicaid as a threat to rural healthcare, Republicans have countered with ads claiming Democratic candidates in Texas and Pennsylvania would put dozens of rural hospitals out of business by creating a public health insurance option. But the ads cite an industry-backed study whose assumptions don’t apply to all public option proposals. 

In Texas, according to ad-tracking service AdImpact, President Donald Trump’s political operation has spent more than $6.9 million on an ad claiming James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for Senate, “supports a radical healthcare plan” that “could close 30 hospitals.”

And in central Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, which includes the state capital of Harrisburg, an ad from a group backed by House Republican leadership claims Democrat Janelle Stelson supports “a plan to close up to 25 Pennsylvania rural hospitals” and accuses her of “closing the hospitals your family depends on.” 

Talarico, a state legislator, is running against state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the closely watched Texas matchup. Stelson, a former local news anchor, is challenging incumbent Republican Rep. Scott Perry. Both races are rated toss-ups by the Cook Political Report.

The GOP ads in Texas and Pennsylvania don’t tell viewers exactly what Democrats’ “radical healthcare plan” is. But both of them cite a 2019 report from the consulting firm Navigant about the potential impact of creating a public option — a form of government-backed health insurance that people could buy into at a lower cost than private insurance. 

That analysis was commissioned by the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a coalition of groups opposed to policies like a public option and Medicare for All. The coalition’s members include groups representing hospitals, insurers and other healthcare and business interests.

The Navigant report estimates that anywhere from 28% to 55% of rural hospitals nationwide would be at “high risk” of closing if a public option were implemented, depending on how many people switch from private insurance. That includes 11 to 30 rural hospitals in Texas and 15 to 25 in Pennsylvania. By comparison, an earlier analysis from the same firm estimated that 21% of rural hospitals were already at high risk of closing without a public option, including 12 in Texas and 9 in Pennsylvania.

But those estimates are based on a major assumption — that a public option would pay hospitals the same rates as Medicare. And that’s not true of every proposal. 

Most recent Democratic public-option proposals we reviewed would pay either rural hospitals or hospitals in general somewhat more than Medicare does. Talarico has said he wants to raise payment rates as part of his healthcare plan, in which case the Navigant study’s assumptions wouldn’t apply. Stelson’s campaign told us she hasn’t committed to a specific public option proposal, but generally supports more funding for rural hospitals.

“I think it would be reasonable to look at this [analysis] with some skepticism,” Christine Monahan, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told us, noting that its estimates of at-risk hospitals are based on a “theoretical proposal” that doesn’t line up with what most advocates are actually proposing. 

Lydia Hall, a spokeswoman for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the group behind the Pennsylvania ad, told us Stelson “knows supporting a public option is unpopular and is now desperately trying to reframe her stance on a position she’s championed for a long time,” but did not answer specific questions about the ad. MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC, did not respond to our questions about the Texas ad. 

Proposals for a public option have circulated for years, including during debates over the 2010 Affordable Care Act and during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Eventual winner Joe Biden was among the candidates championing a public option as a more moderate alternative to proposals like Medicare for All, which would largely or entirely replace private insurance with a government-run single-payer system.

The idea hasn’t gotten as much attention recently, with Democrats’ messaging ahead of the midterms focused largely on reversing Trump’s changes to Medicaid and restoring more generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that Republicans let expire at the end of last year. But some Democrats have said a public option could be on the table if the party retakes power in 2028, and candidates like Talarico and Josh Turek, the Democrat running for Senate in Iowa, have made it a part of their campaign platforms. Others, including Senate candidates Troy Jackson in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, have endorsed more sweeping Medicare for All proposals.

The basic premise of a public option is that the government would create a health insurance plan that people could opt into, with lower premiums than private plans. (Some versions would allow people to buy into Medicare at any age, rather than creating a whole new program.) Proponents hope that would expand coverage to more people and lower overall premiums by forcing private insurers to compete.

The savings that make it possible for a public option to offer lower premiums would come from the government using its leverage to set or negotiate payment rates that are lower than what hospitals typically get from private insurance. So there would likely be some impact on hospitals’ bottom lines.

But what that impact looks like “really depends on how the policy is designed,” including where payment rates are set, said John Holahan, an institute fellow at the Urban Institute who has studied such policies.

The Navigant study cited in the ads assumes that a public option would reimburse healthcare providers at the same rates as Medicare. Because private insurers tend to pay hospitals about 2.5 times what Medicare does for the same services, that “would be a big cut for a lot of hospitals,” Holahan said.

But, he said, most public option proposals don’t go that far. For instance, some aim for rates that are 60% to 100% above what Medicare pays, which he said would be enough to produce some savings without huge impacts on most hospitals’ finances. 

Monahan also noted that the effects would play out differently for different hospitals. Part of the rationale for a public option, she said, is to curb costs at hospitals that can charge excessive prices because they effectively have a monopoly in their area. But some independent hospitals or practices that don’t have the same negotiating leverage with major insurers might benefit from certain public-option pricing systems. Hospitals are also required to provide emergency care regardless of insurance status or ability to pay, so some could see their uncompensated care costs go down if more people have insurance.

Democrats in Congress have proposed several different versions of a public option since 2019, according to comparisons compiled by health policy organizations KFF and The Commonwealth Fund. Some use Medicare rates as a baseline but allow for certain adjustments, such as paying rural hospitals up to 25% or 50% more. Others direct the government to negotiate rates with providers using Medicare rates as a floor, which would presumably result in rates that are somewhat higher.

The Navigant report itself says that depending on how many people switch to a public option, rates that are 40% to 60% above Medicare’s would be enough to “hold rural hospitals harmless.”

We asked the Talarico and Stelson campaigns about how they would set payment rates under a public option, but neither gave us specifics.

Talarico has talked about a proposal he’s calling “Medicare for Y’all,” which would allow Americans of all ages to buy into Medicare as an alternative to private insurance. (Note that this is different from “Medicare for All” proposals, which generally aim to replace private insurance entirely.) His campaign website also says he would “improve Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates,” though a campaign spokesperson, JT Ennis, did not answer our questions about whether Talarico has specific targets in mind. 

Stelson’s campaign told us she broadly supports the concept of a public option, but has not committed to a specific proposal. A spokesperson also pointed us to a policy document the campaign has released that says Stelson would “fight for increased funding and staff for our rural hospitals.”

Without more details, it’s hard to assess the impacts those policies would have. But neither candidate appears to have proposed the specific policy contemplated by the Navigant report — a public option paying current Medicare reimbursement rates — and Talarico has explicitly said he wants reimbursement rates to be higher. So it’s inaccurate to claim, as the ads do, that the candidates support a plan that’s been estimated to risk putting as many as 55 hospitals across Texas and Pennsylvania out of business.

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