The First Amendment doesn’t come with an approval rating

A Secret Service agent confiscated Politico reporter Cheyenne Haslett’s White House credential on Saturday morning. Across the driveway, an MS NOW photographer watched an officer disable her badge. A CNN correspondent was turned away at the gate. The stated reason, according to the White House, was “fake news” created by the three outlets.

I have spent thirty years pricing risk for a living, and I serve as an expert witness in cases where one imprecise word can cost a client seven figures. In my world, “fake news” is a rating, not a legal standard — closer to a Rotten Tomatoes score than a constitutional test. And a rating makes a lousy foundation for government policy.

Let me grant the underlying complaint before I make my argument, because a column that pretends the press has clean hands isn’t worth reading. I think the mainstream media have spent the better part of a decade treating objectivity as optional, and I’ve got the receipts.

CNN retracted a 2017 story tying Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund — a retraction serious enough that three journalists lost their jobs over it. Politico had to walk back a 2020 report claiming Trump owed tens of millions of dollars to the Bank of China, after the bank itself said the debt didn’t exist. And a Media Research Center review of ABC, CBS, and NBC’s evening broadcasts found evaluative coverage of this administration running 92 percent negative through the first hundred days of this term, up from 89 percent during the first.

None of that is a conspiracy theory. The research is published and the corrections are public. Conservatives are right to point at it. Many journalists have a very hostile and malicious attitude toward this White House, such that anything negative becomes worthy of publication — true or........

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