When the Magistrate Curates the News, He Breaks the Trust of Government

The scene is easily told. Several news organizations report that, without notice or process, the White House revoked their journalists’ credentials because it objected to their reporting, and that Secret Service officers physically took those credentials when the reporters sought access to the grounds. Those outlets, joined by others, now sue the officers of the executive for this exclusion. In reply, the White House does not open its doors wider, but instead announces that it will launch “Trump TV” on its own website, while major television networks pause live coverage of presidential events and the pool declines to send any replacement to cover the president’s journey to the United Nations. The struggle in view is not about seats in a room; it is about who may govern the public’s access to truth.

To understand the rights at stake, I must begin where I began in my Second Treatise, with the state of nature: a condition where all are free and equal under the law of nature, bound to harm no other in his life, liberty, or possessions. Men leave that state and consent to political power only that their property, in this broad sense, may be the more secure under known standing laws and impartial judges. Political power is thus a trust, limited to making and executing laws for the public good. Could free and equal persons ever be supposed to consent that, once a ruler is set up, he may close the doors to those who report unfavourably on him, and substitute his own “TV” as the authorised narrative? They might consent to order in the pressroom; they could not consent to censorship.

Secondly, power bears the burden of proof; liberty stands upon its own feet. No man, by being elected or otherwise advanced, acquires a natural title to rule the understanding of others. Yet we are told that certain outlets have been “banned from the White House” and stripped of access “simply because they are news outlets whose viewpoint the president doesn’t like,” and that the justification offered has been that they engage in “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS.” Here is no general law, announced beforehand and applied equally, but a discretionary stroke against particular speakers, grounded only in the magistrate’s dislike of their speech. In such a case the ruler makes himself judge in his own cause, and when the same hand that is accused of abuse claims the right to silence the accuser, reason can see no legitimate title in that claim.

Thirdly, the law of nature forbids harm to another’s liberty, and the public has, as one of these networks aptly observes, a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. Access to the seat of power is not a natural right of any private company; but the liberty of the people to hear a diversity of voices, and not only the ruler’s chosen heralds, is an incident of every man’s property in his own understanding. When those who control the gates of physical access revoke credentials “without notice or process” because of unfriendly reporting, they wield, not a rule for civil order, but a weapon against that public liberty. Such force, however wrapped in official forms, departs from the public good that alone can justify it.

I must also recall what I argued in my Letter Concerning Toleration: that the magistrate’s care extends only to civil interests — life, liberty, health, and possessions — and that “the inward persuasion of the mind,” though I now merely paraphrase myself, cannot be commanded by outward force. To say, as some now warn, that only “Trump TV,” only coverage provided by the government, should be what the public sees, is to claim a jurisdiction over opinion itself. The launch of a president’s own channel, considered merely as a manner of speaking to the nation, is within his liberty; but when joined with the barring of dissenting outlets, it tends toward a government‑controlled narrative, and thereby toward the impossible project of ruling belief by power, rather than persuading the understanding by evidence.

Those who defend such prerogative will plead necessity. They will say that hostile or careless reporting endangers national security or public order, and that the executive must have room to act swiftly, even without standing rule. In my own time I admitted a prerogative to act without the law, and sometimes against the letter of it, when the public good unquestionably requires it and when that power remains answerable to the people. Yet here we are shown no imminent danger, only objection to unfavourable coverage; no clear standard by which tomorrow’s reporters might know their condition; and no impartial judge to which the injured can readily appeal, save by the slow remedy of suit. This is not temporary prerogative, revocable at sight, but the first pattern of a long train of abuses.

I observe with interest that the television pool has chosen, in protest, not to replace the banned outlets and not to cover certain presidential events, and that affected organizations have sought judgment in the courts. This is not rebellion; it is a fitting exercise of their own liberty and of the constitutional forms that remain. When, as I wrote in the Second Treatise, governors endeavour to reduce a people under arbitrary power, they are the first to dissolve the political bond; the people do not so much resist their government as resume the authority which never ceased to be theirs. If you would avoid that last and terrible appeal to heaven, you must check arbitrary exclusions at their beginning, and keep the magistrate forever from becoming master of the story as well as of the sword.