America needs an ironclad, bipartisan commitment to press freedom 

President Trump’s long-running conflict with the American news media has reached a point that demands a broader response. I’d like to offer a proposal. 

The immediate crisis is the White House’s exclusion of CNN, MS NOW and Politico on charges of peddling “fake news,” and the remarkable decision by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News to refuse to replace CNN in the presidential television pool.

A federal judge has now ordered the administration to restore the three organizations’ credentials temporarily, finding they were revoked without adequate due process. Yet reporters were still being denied entry the next day, prompting another emergency appeal to the court. 

By Friday, the presidential television pool was back in place and the legal wrangle was largely resolved. But the larger issue was not. Conflicts involving press credentials, government terminology, Pentagon reporting rules and federal leverage over media companies have repeatedly raised the same question: How much influence should a president have over the institutions responsible for independently covering him?

The answer now has to come from more than courts and news organizations themselves. Political leaders should be asked to put their names behind a short, bipartisan statement of principles on presidential press freedom, circulated to every member of Congress, governor, current Cabinet member and living former Cabinet member. 

Such a statement would provide a simple test that survives the politics of the moment. A Republican can believe CNN treats Trump unfairly and still believe a president should have no power to punish CNN for its journalism. A Democrat can despise Fox News and still recognize that a future Democratic president should have no power to exclude Fox. Press freedom is durable only when its defenders extend it to journalism they........

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