Donald and the Associated Press

Is it legitimate for Donald Trump to exclude the Associated Press briefings?

When I was a youngster (about two centuries ago it sometimes feels like), growing up in Brooklyn, there were only four television channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Nowadays, it sometimes seems as if there are 500 or more of the little darlings. How many major newspapers were there in this neighborhood of mine? There were the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the New York Post, and the Daily News. That was it. There were a few popular magazines and some dozen or so radio stations. If you wanted to be considered as a journalist, you absolutely had to work for one of these organizations.

There has been a slight diminution thereof over the years; the Herald Tribune is no longer with us. However, if you want some news, opinions, to keep up with what is going on, there might now be not hundreds, nor even thousands, but probably tens of thousands of blogs, Substacks, emails, social media platforms, online forums, instant messaging apps, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, TikTok, and other such electronic sources available to you. Your present author even has a Substack of his own, the Lord help us.

So, who counts, nowadays, as a journalist, member of the press, participant in the fourth estate? I dunno. Maybe, everyone and his uncle? Perhaps all of us who have ever scribbled as much as a shopping list? This is not to say that even back in the day there were not millions of people offering others their opinions, advice, news, gossip. Folks wrote letters to each other, did they not?

This issue of who is a journalist and who is not came to the fore when President Trump excluded the AP from a press conference, since it refused to go along with his name change of that body of water to the southeast of the country from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Was he within the bounds of justice to do so?

The libertarian answer to this question is that whoever owns the relevant private property rights is the “decider” of who is a journalist and who is not. If a private company holds a press conference, it and it alone determines the invitation list. Gate crashers, after all, are trespassers.

However, this does not get us too far forward since there is no private property at all involved in the White House, nor on Air Force 1.

Mar-a-Lago is a different kettle of fish. When the Donald Trump invites a few friends, or even a hundred or more of them to his private home, and speaks to them in his role as private citizen, then all bets are off. He may do so, and remain within the bounds of propriety. But this is an extremely difficult bar to jump over, since it cannot be denied that even if he and his guests discuss nothing but football or the weather, still, it is all but impossible to keep these two roles apart.

According to the freedom philosophy, private individuals may discriminate on any basis they wish: race, sex, height, weight, beauty, whatever. May government do so? Absolutely not. It is supposed to be representing all of the people, and equally so.

My Substack should be treated no differently than employees of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Will this reduce the ability of government to get out the message? Yes. Good. It already has far too much to say for itself.

From the radical libertarian anarcho-capitalist perspective, this issue does not even arise. There would be no such thing as the President of the United States. However, from the more moderate libertarian point of view of classical liberalism, or minarchism, we are back at the same old lemonade stand.

What, then, is to be done? Zoom and its cousins is one answer. Let all the “journalists” who want to take part in the presidential press conference do so, all 100 million of them, of us, just to pick a nice round number out of the proverbial hat. That leaves the question of who gets to ask the questions. A lottery will take care of that in short order. Elderly spinsters with cats should have as much right to have a winning lottery ticket for this opportunity as anyone else. Of course, as the purchase price of such access rises, that will undoubtedly winnow out the field. We might have such “journalists” as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Charles Koch and other zillionaires doing much of the heavy breathing in such a context.

Another way of so doing would be to define journalists on the basis of the number of their readership. That would leave the AP and its ilk in the cat bird seat, and most others out in the cold. Yet, there will be difficulties here too. A newspaper that is given away for free might well attain more readers, but should that be the only consideration that counts? Maybe, instead, or in addition, go by the number of employees of such literary periodicals.

If Trump can exclude the AP and other left leaning periodicals, then the next president, if he is of the Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders mold, can return the favor vis a vis Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page (writers for the news section of this paper would of course be welcome).

Of course there is always the alternative of licensing journalists. This is far and away removed from any vestige of freedom, justice, or libertarianism. The presumed function of the fourth estate is to keep an eye on the other three. And not just any eye; rather, a particularly beady one. Equally obnoxious if not more so is when the government owns and manages such media; virtually every country on the planet engages in such an execrable practice, ever relatively free ones such as the United States (PBS) and Canada (CBC).

Woe unto us.