To put it simply, no president should be given the power to grant White House press credentials. The president is the single most important person under inspection by the media.
If the president is the sole person to grant press credentials, that also makes them the sole person controlling their image—one they would obviously like to keep in a positive light.
The accusation of “fake news” President Trump likes to instill in people’s minds would only be heightened if he were the only one to grant press credentials. The news would become entirely biased and filled only with the image Trump likes to portray.
The job of the news would ultimately become irrelevant because they would not have fair access to the person at the top of our nation’s social and political hierarchy.
This is not to say President Trump would be the only president we would have to worry about. These statements are not anti-Trump, but rather pro-first amendment.
Free speech is the basis of this argument and with limited sources entering the White House, free speech would become lost. It would become free speech only for a select number of carefully tailored news sources, those that are willing to support whomever is in office at the time.
An outstanding example of how this could cause a problem is in the Watergate Scandal of 1972. According to History, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the initial scandal to light for much of the general public.
If The Washington Post were to be banned, essentially, from the White House at that time, they would not have made the splash they did by reporting the story in mainstream media.
To say Nixon would not have been impeached does not seem likely, but the news may have been reported in a better light, not allowing the American people to understand the full scope of his impeachment.
To avoid incidents such as the one previously described, White House press credentials must have a fair portion of people reviewing them. The president should not touch the matter because it is our right as U.S. citizens to hold our president under a microscope. We are not a democracy if we fail to do so, or are prevented from doing so.
The job of a journalist is to make sure this microscope examines all sides, and it seems doubtful any president would allow unfavorable media inside their doors.
President Trump banned The Washington Post’s access to his events in 2016, according to WashingtonPost.com. He called the newspaper “dishonest and phony” based on a headline they wrote saying Trump linked Obama to the Orlando shooting, according to the website.
If he was willing to ban them based on one headline without rationally stating his case, it does not seem likely he would change his approach in the future.
Naturally, the other side of this argument is that even if the president alone grants press passes, those media outlets that receive the honor will report accurately and fairly.
To this I say, think of when you were a child. You were sitting in gym class and were chosen first by the captain of the kickball team. Of course you began to see this person in a positive light, whether you were controlling that or not.
You beat out the other children in your class and you became linked with that captain. The same would happen if news outlets were hand-picked by a president to report his doings. Choose the safe route—keep the president out of this kickball game.
