CNN, MS NOW, and Politico File Lawsuit Against President Trump
Why the President Must Not Choose His Own Reporters
When rulers begin to ration who may witness their conduct, they do not merely quarrel with journalists; they tamper with the price system of information on which a free people and a free market both depend.
The scene is almost theatrical. A president prepares to leave the house of power for the assembly of nations, and the eyes of the country are invited to follow. Yet here, we are told, certain news organisations—CNN, MS NOW, Politico—allege that they were excluded from the common vantage, and that this exclusion violates their constitutional rights. Other major networks, who might have profited from the absence of a rival, instead supported CNN’s role as the shared “pool” observer of the president’s departure and journey to the United Nations in New York. When those who sell attention insist upon sharing it, the philosopher is bound to ask what principle, beyond mere trade, is at stake.
In my inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, I assigned to the sovereign three great duties: defence, the administration of justice, and certain public works and institutions which private interest would never adequately supply. Among these institutions, none is more essential than a system of law that secures the citizen against arbitrary power. A president deciding which reporters may see his public movements is not very different, in kind, from a magistrate choosing which witnesses may enter the courtroom. When the judge selects the spectators, the trial ceases to be public, however crowded the chamber may appear.
The question, therefore, is not whether these news companies act from self-interest; of course they do, as the butcher and brewer do when they serve us. It is whether, in defending their own access, they defend at the same time a rule that benefits those who buy, rather than sell, information. Pool coverage is a humble but important contrivance. It lowers the cost of observation by allowing one to stand for many, and thus extends the market of knowledge to a wider public. If a ruler may, at pleasure, withdraw even that shared eye, the unseen losers are not the journalists left at the gate, but the citizens left in the dark.
As I argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the impartial spectator—the well-informed, disinterested observer we consult within our own breast—does not ask whether he likes this or that newspaper. He asks whether a rule of conduct is fit to be made universal. If the president may silence one critical outlet today, may he not, by the same principle, silence another tomorrow, and a third the day after, until only the compliant remain? The spectator, placing himself now in the situation of the humblest labourer whose only riches are his wages and his vote, cannot approve a practice that leaves him dependent on information curated to flatter the existing power.
Some will object that these media companies are merchants of attention, no less than others are merchants of corn, and that their lawsuit is but another instance of a trade seeking legal privilege. This suspicion is, I confess, generally well founded; I have long observed that people of the same trade commonly contrive to manage the public to their own advantage. Yet there is a difference between asking the state to exclude your rivals from the market, and asking it not to exclude you. In the former case, the merchant demands a monopoly; in the latter, only a fair place at the stall, under a rule that all may equally invoke against the caprice of authority.
We must remember, too, that men are governed by incentives, not sermons. If a president finds that punishing unfriendly coverage costs him nothing in law, he will, being human, be tempted to repeat the experiment. Praise-worthiness depends not on the goodness of outcomes alone, but on the restraint of power when it could be abused with impunity. A clear judicial rule that rulers may not choose their own questioners introduces a salutary price to such experiments: the price of defeat in court, of public rebuke, of precedent turned against future abuse, whosoever commits it. This is self-interest corrected by institution, not by homily.
I do not pretend to grasp all the refinements of your constitutional law, any more than I foresaw the scale of your modern media empires or their massive mergers. But I know this much: when disputes about liberty are carried not to the street but to the courts; when rivals in trade support a principle that limits the ruler rather than one that shackles the consumer; when access to the great chess-board of politics is defended for all players, not reserved to favourites, the natural progress is towards a more decent opulence of information as well as of goods. A president who cannot pick his reporters is a president still answerable to his people, and that is no small safeguard of their fortunes.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise; to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing, and to be blamed unjustly stings less than to deserve blame.