If you've been following the story about the White House banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico, and you're thinking that could never happen here, I hate to disappoint you. It did. Five years ago. To yours truly.
In October 2021, Attorney General Todd Rokita held a press conference billed as credentialed media only. I showed up with the Statehouse media badge I'd carried for years, and a staffer at the door informed me I wasn't credentialed. On my way over, the press secretary had emailed to suggest I watch the livestream instead. Afterward, the office clarified that I wasn't an actual journalist, but a gossip columnist.
I asked, in writing, for the criteria that office used to hand out media credentials. I also filed a public records request for them. I am still waiting.
In February 2022, the ACLU of Indiana filed Shabazz v. Rokita in federal court. Five weeks later it ended in a stipulated dismissal: the general agreed to let me in on the same terms as everybody else. No judgment, no finding, no fees for my side.
Stick around long enough and you see everything two or three times. This time it went national, with better lawyers.
Last Friday, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was "banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW … and Politico" from the White House, "effective immediately." By Saturday morning the Secret Service was collecting hard passes at the gate. The outlets sued Monday. And early Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the administration to hand the passes back for 14 days while he decides whether to make it permanent.
The two cases share a structure. A credentialed reporter gets shown the door by an official who doesn't care for the coverage. There are no written standards, no notice and no hearing, and the reporter is sent home with a livestream as a parting gift. But the real work happens before and after the podium: the hallway question, the aide who stops to clarify a number. None of that comes through your laptop.
Both cases also run the same play. You can't ban a reporter over coverage and say so out loud, so you go after the reporter instead. Rokita's office decided I was a gossip columnist. The Justice Department advised Judge Kelly that these outlets had published classified information and failed to meet minimum professional standards.
Here's the part that got my attention as a lawyer, and it isn't the part making headlines. They didn't win on the First Amendment. They won on due process, because nobody bothered to give these reporters notice or a chance to respond. Kelly, whom Trump himself put on that bench in 2017, found the government's professional-conduct standard "so vague it hardly does the trick." He wasn't buying national security either: nothing in the record, he wrote, suggests the revocations had anything to do with it.
Which brings me back to those credentialing criteria I never got. That wasn't a paperwork question. That was the whole ballgame. If you can't produce the standard, you can't show you followed it.
Now the sober part, because I don't believe my own press, or anybody else's. A 14-day restraining order is not a victory lap. Justice says it's appealing. And the fight over the television pool is unresolved, which matters. Last year, in the Associated Press's case, a divided panel of that same circuit let the White House keep the AP out of the Oval Office and Air Force One while the appeal played out, on the theory that the First Amendment doesn't reach those rooms at all. That will be the government's best argument here, and it isn't a bad one.
Asked whether his ban would hold up in court, Trump said it "depends on the judge you get." He got the judge he appointed. He lost anyway.
When I sued, people asked if it was personal. It wasn't. I still have Todd Rokita's cell number in my phone. As a private citizen, he was free to block me, ignore me, or conclude I'm the worst writer in Indiana. As attorney general, he wasn't free to decide which reporters get to cover his office. That's the distinction, and it's the one that keeps getting missed. An official who can ban one reporter can ban any of them.
Same suit, different day.