How due process, not the First Amendment, got the White House ban on reporters blocked in court

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore press credentials to CNN, MS NOW and Politico after the White House revoked them, citing what Trump called their coverage of 'FAKE NEWS.' U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, based his ruling on the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee rather than the First Amendment, echoing his 2018 decision in the Jim Acosta case.

Legal precedent from Sherrill v. Knight (1977) requires the government to give journalists notice and a chance to respond before pulling access, grounded in both First and Fifth Amendment protections working together. Commentators across the political spectrum, including a Trump-friendly law professor, called the ban an assault on press freedom, but the court's actual reasoning turned on whether the government skipped the paperwork of due process, not whether it disliked the coverage.

The administration did not provide the outlets with the notice-and-response process the courts have required since the 1970s, according to Kelly's ruling. The pattern from 2018 repeated itself: revoke first, get sued, lose on procedural grounds, quietly restore access later.

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