CNN, MSNBC, and Politico sued the Trump administration this week in federal court, alleging violations of their First Amendment and Fifth Amendment rights after the White House revoked their press credentials. The three outlets claim the ban was retaliation for their reporting and represents a threat to “press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
The corporate media’s outrage might land harder if they hadn’t spent years undermining their own credibility.
The Trump administration isn’t restricting these outlets’ freedom to speak — it’s simply declining to grant them access to the White House briefing room. There’s a difference.
“Listen to yourself.” — Vice President JD Vance to an ABC journalist
The Record Speaks for Itself
Americans aren’t short on examples of left-wing legacy media’s biased reporting designed to damage President Trump and his allies. CNN spent years peddling now-discredited narratives about Trump that originated in an opposition research firm funded by the Clinton campaign.
The network buried the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 because of the damage it would inflict on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. CNN dismissed legitimate theories about Covid’s origins as conspiracy theories — theories that now appear almost certain to be true. The network also refused to report on Biden’s obvious cognitive decline while in office until his disastrous 2024 debate made it impossible to ignore.
It’s no surprise that American trust in the media hit an all-time low. As of October 2025, only 28 percent of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” — down from 40 percent in 2020.
In 2024, a Media Insight Project survey found that just 14 percent of Americans had a “great deal of confidence in election-related information” from national news organizations. A 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report noted that only 25 percent of Americans trusted news overall — a five-point drop from 2025 and the lowest level since Reuters began tracking the measure in 2015.
Selective Memory on Press Access
The media also seem to have forgotten their own history. The Obama and Biden administrations routinely restricted conservative outlets from access or controlled which outlets received interviews.
In 2009, the Obama White House initially tried to exclude Fox News from an interview with Treasury czar Kenneth Feinberg. In 2014, the Obama administration excluded Fox from interviews with Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, though both appeared on left-wing programming.
In 2023, the Biden White House refused New York Post White House correspondent Steven Nelson credentials to an event. Even The Washington Post acknowledged that Nelson was denied access to Biden events for almost 10 months.
And yet left-wing media soldiers on as self-professed martyrs, seemingly oblivious to their bias, selective memory, and self-inflicted credibility crisis.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — whom Trump confronted Tuesday in New York City — has a history of biased “fact-checking” and making false statements obviously intended to undermine Trump’s credibility. Jake Tapper has been at the forefront of much of legacy media’s unprofessionalism, from dismissing Biden’s decline to his questionable relationship with Anthony Fauci.
“Our obligation is to report facts.” — Jake Tapper
Tapper said that with no apparent hint of irony.
No Capacity for Contrition
Collins and Tapper are far from unusual in this narcissistic belief in their own moral superiority. Joy Reid — the archetypal leftist grievance huckster whose MSNBC program was canceled in 2025 — now hosts a video podcast focused on attacking Trump, conservative “threats” to democracy, and pushing racial grievances.
Don Lemon, fired from CNN in 2023 after a long career attacking conservatives, still focuses his professional energies on the Trump administration, race, and immigration.
Whether we’re talking about The View and its obvious leftist punditry, CNN’s continued attempts to peddle racial grievance narratives, or corporate media’s refusal to accept responsibility for promoting Anthony Fauci’s devastatingly costly mistakes during the Covid pandemic, one could spend hours searching for left-wing journalists willing to admit they made a mistake.
These trends far predate Trump. CNN was blatantly biased in its Obama-versus-Romney coverage in 2012. MSNBC demonstrated obvious favoritism toward Obama over McCain-Palin in 2008. Corporate media in the 1960s and 1970s abandoned all claims to journalistic objectivity in their united hatred of Richard Nixon.
The Fourth Estate’s Messiah Complex
What explains leftist legacy media’s inability to see what so many Americans see about themselves? Celebrated 19th-century English author Anthony Trollope offers one answer: the journalistic profession tends toward a messiah complex. Their role as the “fourth estate” — holding institutions accountable — convinces them of their own moral superiority.
In his novel The Warden, Trollope writes that the newspaperman is “a pope, self-nominated, self-consecrated … one who can excommunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men’s charity; make you odious to your dearest friends.”
Trollope notes the media outlet serves as a “Mount Olympus … the mouthpiece of all the wisdom of this great country,” while the journalist is someone who “walked on from day to day, studiously striving to look a man, but knowing within his breast that he was a god.”
The latest White House press-credential controversy exposes legacy media’s delusions of self-importance and how impervious they are to self-reflection. They apparently believe they have a First Amendment “right” to access the president.
Thankfully, in an increasingly diverse and decentralized media environment, their role in American politics is finally waning as citizens turn to other, more virtuous and principled sources of news.
