RonNell Andersen Jones

They sort of signaled that they might see this as the equivalent of

offering up an exclusive interview or an invitation to a private event.

And then if you get the invitation, you get it.

If you don't, you don't.

The undercurrent of concern for press freedom advocates is that it is messaging that those who favor the president or the administration will have access and those who do not won't, which raises concerns for the sort of free flow of information on matters of public concern to people across the country.

Yes, this was a really rare instance of the entirety of the media really banding together to push back on this.

A number of news organizations gathered together to issue a statement against it, opposing this policy, ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN, but they were also joined by Fox News.

A lot of organizations across the media spectrum suggested that this was a bad policy and it was problematic.

The policy itself really required them, in order to keep their trespasses, to sign on that they understood that soliciting information from a military official was tantamount to committing a crime, which sort of felt to them like it was criminalizing doing something as basic as seeking news tips.

And dozens of reporters who had been there for a very long time, essentially all of the core of the Pentagon press corps, surrendered their badges rather than submitting to these conditions.

It was seen by press advocates as a really powerful show of support for press freedom.

But of course,

What it leaves is a vacuum.

We're left without the folks who had the knowledge and the experience and the insight into coverage of defense and military issues that have been there for a long time.

A little more than a month ago, the New York Times filed suit against the policy, arguing that it violates the Constitution's due process and free speech and press freedom provisions.

That case remains in the courts.

The CBS suit is actually just one of a really quite large number of suits in which Trump appears as a plaintiff in either defamation cases or cases that are similar to defamation cases in that they are civil suits that challenge a decision to run something that cast the president in a light that he found disfavorable.

The president of the United States right now is one of the most prominent and most prolific defamation plaintiffs in the country.

In addition to CBS, we've seen suits against ABC and the BBC and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Pulitzer Board.

and the Des Moines Register.