“It has been held impermissible,” Judge Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters<br />and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”<br />Last Friday’s developments at the White House crossed<br />that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.<br />“It is common knowledge,” Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., “that reporting is highly competitive,<br />and reporters cultivate access — sometimes exclusive access — to sources, including government officials.<br />“White House press facilities having been made publicly available as a source of information for newsmen, the protection afforded news gathering under the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press, requires<br />that this access not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons,” Judge Carl E. McGowan wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.<br />“Not only newsmen and the publications for which they write, but also the public at large have an interest protected by the First Amendment in assuring<br />that restrictions on news gathering be no more arduous than necessary, and that individual newsmen not be arbitrarily excluded from sources of information.”<br />Scott Gant, a lawyer with Boies Schiller & Flexner<br />and the author of “We’re All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Law in the Internet Age,” said Friday’s developments were troubling.<br />“The exclusion of certain news organizations from press briefings, if motivated by disagreement or displeasure with their coverage of the administration,<br />may well have crossed an important constitutional line — potentially constituting violations of the First Amendment,” he said.
