Chapter 1: What events led to concerns about press freedom during the Trump administration?
It started with the banning of the Associated Press from certain White House events over the refusal to use the term Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico. Then there was a recent FBI search of a Washington Post reporter's home. And then in January, two journalists, including former CNN host Don Lemon, were arrested following an immigration protest at City's Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
What's happening to freedom of the press? Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt.
Chapter 2: How has the Trump administration's hostility towards the press manifested?
I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, February 9th, 2026. President Donald Trump wasn't particularly friendly to the press in his first term. In his second term, he's been downright openly hostile towards specific reporters and outlets in his Oval Office briefings. Should the media fight back?
Chapter 3: What are the implications of the arrests of journalists covering protests?
And if so, how? Here to help us dive into all things First Amendment is Ronnell Anderson-Jones, professor of law at the University of Utah. It's good to have you here, Ronnell.
Thanks for having me.
Let's start with this latest story involving two reporters covering a recent church protest in Minnesota. Both have now been released. Can you give us some of the context here?
Yeah, these two journalists, one a local Minneapolis journalist and the other former CNN journalist, Don Lemon. accompanied protesters to the church in Minneapolis.
Chapter 4: What is the chilling effect on journalism from government actions?
The protesters were going to the church to protest a pastor there who is an ICE official. They documented and interviewed people who were there, both parishioners and protesters, and the pastor, although it wasn't the pastor who was the subject of the protest, and then later were charged. for violating two federal laws.
One, a law that bans disruptions at houses of worship, and the other, a law that makes it a felony, punishable up to 10 years, to disrupt the exercise of constitutional rights of other people. Here, the exercise of the freedom of religion. And it was an extraordinary move, never in the history of the country that I can find have journalists been charged under either of those statutes.
And at an early stage, the government sought to charge them, and a magistrate judge and an appellate judge declined to issue the arrest warrants, saying that these acts of journalism weren't criminal behaviors or conspiracy to commit criminal behaviors.
But this represents an aggressive move on the part of the administration to seek the grand jury indictment against them and to move forward with a criminal action against them on these charges.
Beyond the rights of these individual reporters, it's hard not to assume that even if a judge dismisses the charges, the signal to the press from this administration is possibly intended to intimidate. For reporters working with larger established organizations like USA Today, there are teams of lawyers to fight the charges.
But for freelancers who don't have access to those resources, these arrests may very well make them think twice next time. What are you hearing on this front?
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Chapter 5: What happened during the FBI search of a Washington Post reporter's home?
This is a grave concern for press freedom advocates, both domestically and internationally, who are watching some of these developments. The individual arrests themselves are concerning, but the wider messaging is what's most concerning. There is clear First Amendment doctrine that refers to the chilling effect.
It's the notion that these sorts of actions by the government that infringe on freedom of speech or freedom of the press are aren't just having an impact on the individual journalists here who are the targets of the government.
They're having and are designed to have a wider impact on everyone else who is potentially practicing journalism and the sources who are potentially working with those who are practicing journalism. The idea is that it has this ripple effect and that those who think that they couldn't
afford the legal battle that might be on the other end of it, or who in this instance don't want them to be criminally charged, will think twice before they engage in behavior that is critical of the government or that might be aggressive investigative journalism.
And the overarching effect of this, the fear is, is that it quells important government on matters of public concern because people are making front-end calculations to sort of stop the kind of coverage that they engage in.
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Chapter 6: How did the Washington Post and the government respond to the search?
The ACLU or the American Civil Liberties Union has long championed freedom of the press causes. What are they saying?
So lots of civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, are condemning these sorts of moves. The concern that they're expressing is that this is part and parcel of a wider democratic backsliding, that there's an interrelationship between press freedom and the backsliding of democracy more generally, that it's
central to our conversations about self-government and the kind of policies that we want to have and the kinds of viewpoints that we want to advance with our government to be able to have a free flow of news coverage. The concern here that has been expressed by lots of these civil liberties organizations is that these become tools for government to avoid transparency or to reshape truth.
And those sorts of concerns are broader than the individual rights of particular journalists. The Supreme Court has said lots of times that press freedom rights really aren't about special rights for journalists. They're about the rights for all of us. The journalists are standing in our stead and engaging in that behavior on our behalf.
And so there's a wider democratic concern that's at play there.
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of the AP's ban from White House events?
Ronell, I want to shift now to the recent FBI search on that Washington Post reporter's home. What happened there?
The Department of Justice got a warrant to search the home of a Washington Post reporter named Hannah Nattinson. The search was broadly executed. They took laptops and a cell phone and a smartwatch and recording devices and a portable hard drive that the Washington Post says contained multiple terabits of information, something like 30,000 emails, took all of this in this search of her home.
A search of a journalist's home is a very big deal and really an unprecedented move and is governed by federal law in a way that is making this a real challenge. And all of the sort of Dynamics about the wider chilling effect that we were just discussing come into play again here.
The concerns are not just the target of the individual search, but all of the sources who might be swept up in that search. So that case is progressing through the court, both to challenge the individual search, which press freedom advocates are concerned violated a clear federal law.
but also to sort of think about some of the wider constitutional concerns that are at play when we think about the Espionage Act, which is the statute that is likely to come into play here.
And how have The Washington Post and the administration responded?
So the administration's explanation is that they are investigating a very serious charge of an Espionage Act violation by another person, a potential source of this Post reporter. That individual was apparently a government contractor who is alleged to have misused, mishandled confidential classified information that he came into contact with over the course of his work.
And the government has said that there were illegalities involved and that they were investigating those illegalities. And so they needed to search the reporter's home in order to tackle them. The Washington Post and the reporter have noted that there is a federal law.
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Chapter 8: How are recent lawsuits against media outlets impacting press freedom?
It's called the Privacy Protection Act, and it has a fairly strict ban on searching illegal newspapers and reporters' homes and newsrooms for work product and documentary materials that were gathered by the reporter in the course of news gathering. And there are only very, very narrow exceptions. One problem that exists here is that the government itself didn't address that law.
And so tussling with what exception it exists, I think, is a part of the ongoing court battle here. One exception that does exist to that law is if the journalists themselves are the target of the investigation, that is, they are suspected of committing a crime, then those searches are legal.
And one large concern that press freedom advocates now have is that this might signal that the Justice Department believes that the journalist herself could somehow be implicated under the Espionage Act.
That would be a radical expansion of the treatment of the Espionage Act and would be fraught with a lot of First Amendment concerns that we've discussed over the last decade in thinking about the scope and contours of that act.
I also mentioned the White House ban on AP reporters to certain events last year because of their refusal to use Trump's preferred Gulf of America terminology. Of course, as a wire service, many hundreds of outlets around the world rely on their coverage to share with their audiences. So that came with a big economic cost to them. Did the AP ever get their access back?
And if so, what did they have to do to lift the ban?
Yeah, this case has been challenged in the courts.
Initially, a lower court judge who was a Trump appointee ruled in favor of the AP and said that while the White House didn't need to open things up to reporters more generally, once they had done so, they couldn't engage in brazen viewpoint discrimination, eliminating the access on the grounds that the president didn't like that they refused to use his preferred words and phrases.
The appellate court in D.C.
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