Legacy Media Implode Over Losing White House Passes

Earlier this week, CNN, MS NOW, and Politico joined forces to sue the Trump administration in federal court, alleging that the administration had violated their First Amendment free press rights and Fifth Amendment right to due process by banning them from the White House. The three media organizations further claimed that the revocation of their credentials was “because it [the White House] objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”

The left-wing corporate media establishment will forgive us if we are forced to suppress our laughter at their fake outrage that “the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes.” (The Trump administration, after all, is not restricting the media’s freedom to speak, but simply their access to the White House.)

It’s hard to imagine a more delusional, self-righteous institution than legacy media, whose lack of self-awareness rivals the most awkward, unkempt middle schooler fruitlessly attempting to attract the attention of a member of the opposite sex. Whatever the legal claims of the media — which are irrelevant to my argument here — it would be good (though sadly unlikely) if those collectively pearl-clutching over this latest “indignity” would consider Vice President Vance’s memorable exhortation to an ABC journalist: “Listen to yourself.”

Do We Really Have to Remind Them of Their Record?

It’s not like the American people are short of examples of left-wing legacy media’s biased reporting obviously intended to denigrate and destroy President Trump and his allies. CNN for years peddled as legitimate now-discredited narratives about Trump that were subsequently discovered to have their origin in an opposition research firm funded by the Clinton campaign.

The outlet egregiously underreported the Hunter Biden laptop story because of how much it would damage his father’s chances in the presidential election. It tarred legitimate theories about the origins of Covid as ridiculous conspiracies that now seem almost certain to be true. CNN also refused to report on Biden’s obvious decline while in office until it became impossible to ignore after his disastrous 2024 debate with Trump.

It’s thus no surprise that American trust in the media is at 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 discovered that a mere 14 percent of Americans possessed a “great deal of confidence in election-related information” from national news organizations. A Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report in turn noted that only 25 percent of Americans trusted news overall, a decrease of 5 percentage points from 2025, and the lowest level in the United States since Reuters began tracking this measure in 2015.

The media also seem to have a curious selective memory — the Obama and Biden administrations, after all, consistently restricted conservative media outlets from access or controlled which outlets were permitted interviews. In 2009, the Obama White House initially attempted 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 Kerry and Rice appeared on left-wing programming.

Moreover, in 2023, the Biden White House refused New York Post White House correspondent Steven Nelson credentials to an event; indeed, 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 on the altar of free speech, seemingly oblivious to trends showcasing their bias, selective memory, and the self-inflicted implosion of their credibility. CNN’s self-professed apolitical Kaitlan Collins, whom Trump castigated on Tuesday in New York City, has a history of biased, fallacious “fact-checking” and of making false statements obviously intended to undermine Trump’s credibility.

“Journalist” Jake Tapper, in turn, has been at the forefront of much of legacy media’s unprofessionalism, from dismissing Biden’s decline to refusing to cover Trump to his questionable and unprofessional relationship with Anthony Fauci. “Our obligation is to report facts,” Tapper once declared, with no apparent hint of irony.

An Industry With No Capacity for Contrition

Collins and Tapper are far from unusual in this narcissistic belief in their own moral superiority and inability to demonstrate the slightest bit of self-reflection. Joy Reid, that archetypal leftist grievance huckster, whose MSNBC program was canceled in 2025, now hosts a thrice-weekly video podcast, where she focuses on Trump, conservative “threats” to American democracy, race, immigration, and attacking conservative politicians and commentators.

Don Lemon, fired in 2023 from CNN after a long career attacking conservatives and pushing narratives of racial and sexual grievance, still focuses his professional energies on the Trump administration, race, LGBT issues, and, of course, immigration, as we witnessed earlier this year.

Whether we are talking about The View and its obvious leftist punditry, CNN’s continued attempts to peddle racial grievance narratives, or corporate media’s intransigent refusal to accept responsibility for their complicity in promoting Anthony Fauci’s devastatingly costly mistakes during the Covid pandemic, one could spend many hours attempting to find left-wing professional journalists who were able to admit they made a mistake or had a wrong opinion.

And, it is worth noting, these trends far predate the phenomenon that is Trump: CNN was blatantly biased in its coverage of Obama versus Romney; MSNBC demonstrated obvious favoritism toward Obama over the McCain-Palin ticket; corporate media in the 1960s and 1970s forewent all claims to journalistic objectivity in their united hatred of Richard Nixon.

The Irrelevance of the Fourth Estate

What explains leftist legacy media’s inability to see what so many of us Americans see about themselves? One answer proposed by celebrated 19th-century English author Anthony Trollope is that the journalistic profession tends toward a certain messiah complex, since their role as the so-called “fourth estate,” in which they are to hold other institutions and people accountable, results in convincing themselves of their own moral superiority.

In his novel The Warden, Trollope notes 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, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger!” Trollope lays it on amusingly thick: “It is a fact amazing to ordinary mortals that [the newspaperman] is never wrong. With what endless care, with what unsparing labour, do we not strive to get together for our great national council the men most fitting to compose it.” 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 controversy over the White House removing the press credentials of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico further exposes legacy media’s delusions of their own self-importance and how impervious they are to contrition or self-reflection. They apparently believe they have a First Amendment “right” to have access to and report on 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, responsible, and principled sources of news.

Jack Danielson (a pen name) has almost 15 years of managerial experience in a variety of jobs in the United States and abroad. His writing had been featured in many publications. The Federalist verifies the identities of its pseudonymous authors.