As CNN, Politico and MS NOW challenge their White House ban in court, a similar press access battle is playing out in Utah — one that dates back to the beginning of last year.

There, Bryan Schott, a longtime political journalist and founder of Utah Political Watch, has been fighting to get press credentials to the Utah State Legislature. Over the summer, a panel of federal judges revived Schott’s lawsuit, sending it back to a lower court to determine whether the legislature had discriminated against him based on his viewpoint, which would violate the First Amendment.

“(It) is pretty much the same argument that’s happening right now in the CNN versus Trump case on a national level,” Schott said.

Across the country, journalists at the state and local levels are experiencing many of the same access issues as their national counterparts. They are being turned away from press conferences, stonewalled by politicians and excluded from government spaces they previously had access to. Those measures don’t stop them from reporting on their elected officials, but they do make their jobs harder. Stories take longer and cost more. Sometimes they get shelved indefinitely, leaving the public with less information about the people who govern them.

The press, due to its watchdog role, has often had an adversarial relationship with the government. But longtime local and state government reporters say that relationship has deteriorated significantly in recent years. Some point to 2016 and President Donald Trump’s first term as the starting point; others to the pandemic. But many agree that the decline of local journalism, the rise of social media and the intensification of political polarization have emboldened political leaders to shut out — and at times, actively antagonize — local journalists.

“I’m sure that they’re asking themselves, ‘Why do we need to have our message filtered through a reporter, a journalist, an outside organization when just as easily, we can decide what is said about our policies?’” Schott said. “‘Why should we give equal access to the media who might not report things the way that we want?’”

A deteriorating local news landscape

When Sherman Smith started reporting full-time on the Kansas Statehouse in 2018, the press corps was much more robust. A committee hearing on a major bill would have at least a half dozen reporters in attendance to cover it. Now, at a similar meeting, Smith, who is the editor-in-chief of the Kansas Reflector, might be the only one in the room.

“There were times when it’s like, we have to get an explanation out of this person. You could form a wall of reporters and make sure they weren’t going to leave this room until they answered everybody’s questions together,” Smith said. “And we don’t have that really anymore.”

Of the few statehouse reporters who are left, many are less experienced, Smith said. Those who do stay often end up leaving after a few years. Smith said that makes it easy for legislators to isolate the Reflector — a nonprofit digital outlet covering Kansas government and politics — as a target.

It is unclear how many statehouse reporters there are now. (A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that the overall number had increased since 2014, but fewer of them covered state government full time.) But the number of local journalists has decreased dramatically in the past few decades. A 2026 study by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News found that the number of full-time local journalists had decreased by 75% since 2002.

With fewer journalists covering state and local politics, public officials become less accustomed to interacting with reporters.

That’s what has happened in Miami, said David Villano, editor of the Coconut Grove Spotlight. The number of city hall reporters there has been dwindling for years. The Miami Herald, the city’s paper of record, laid off its city hall reporter last month, for example. When the Spotlight launched in its current iteration in 2024, it brought a kind of scrutiny that Miami City Hall — which is located in Coconut Grove — had not faced “in quite a while,” Villano said.

That was around the time that Miami started to enforce an old media policy dating back to 2011 that prevents city employees from talking to the press without prior approval. As a result, city employees have denied interview requests from the Spotlight and declined to answer questions. When the Spotlight routes inquiries to the city’s communications department, it is often met with silence.

The Spotlight sued the city of Miami in June, contending that the media policy both violates city employees’ First Amendment rights and hurts the outlet’s newsgathering abilities. The two sides will meet with a magistrate judge next month for a mediation conference.

“What we are insisting upon is some sort of proactive language within some policy document that advises and reminds employees of their rights under the Constitution to speak freely on matters of their expertise with the media without prior approval,” Villano said.

The city of Miami did not respond to a request for comment.

Villano speculated that in addition to the erosion of the local news ecosystem, trickle-down effects from the culture of hostility toward the press at the national and state level prompted the sudden enforcement of Miami’s 2011 media policy.

Smith noted a similar possible trickle-down effect in Kansas. In early 2025, after Trump’s reelection, state legislators implemented a series of initiatives to restrict press access.

First, in January, Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins banned journalists from reporting from the House floor, denying them access to a workspace where they had easy access to legislators. Instead, they were relegated to the back wall, where they had to stand and could observe and take photos but were not allowed to take notes or approach legislators for interviews.

Then Kansas House Republicans closed their caucus meetings to reporters. Prior to 2025, that was a rare occurrence, happening once every couple of years, Smith said. Now, House Republicans have a private space to discuss bills so that when they go on the floor, they can cast their votes without having to explain their decision.

Also in 2025, Kansas state Sen. Virgil Peck proposed increasing the rent outlets pay for offices in the statehouse from a fixed rate of $100 per year to $1 per square foot per month. The six outlets holding statehouse offices collectively saw their annual rent increase to $16,000, the Reflector reported. (Peck this year proposed another increase to $11 per square foot per month but was unsuccessful.)

Any of the outlets that had offices (the Reflector was not one of them) would have had “very easy standing to sue” because in proposing the increase, Peck made it clear he was targeting the outlets for their content, Smith said.

“When I mention this in a forum back home, people come unglued: ‘You are only charging $100 a year for the press to write stories about you’ — that frequently are inaccurate,” Peck said when he proposed the initial increase.

Hawkins and Peck did not respond to a request for comment.

Targeting independent journalists

As legacy newspapers and other traditional outlets shrink, independent journalists have become a larger part of the local news landscape. But those reporters face their own challenges as public officials question their legitimacy as journalists and deny them access.

Before Schott founded Utah Political Watch, he covered state politics for The Salt Lake Tribune and held press credentials to cover the state legislature for years. That changed in 2024, when he tried to obtain a credential for the 2025 legislative session as a reporter for UPW. Utah House and Senate media liaisons Alex Musselman and Aundrea Peterson told him, “Utah Capitol media credentials are currently not issued to blogs, independent or other freelance journalists.”

“I think I was targeted because I was no longer protected by a large organization,” S