On: Trump bans CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House

They didn’t announce a ban. They announced an “update to press pool access.” Update. Like a software patch. Like a menu change. They took “banning journalists” and bought it a suit.

Look at the word “access.” A credential is a permission slip to witness. Nobody stopped the printing. They stopped the seeing. That difference is the whole story.

Trace the language backward. First the press became “fake news.” Two words, easy to chant. Then it became “the enemy of the people.” That phrase isn’t American. It comes from tribunals. Robespierre said it. Stalin said it. It’s the phrase you use while the door is still open, so nobody’s startled when it shuts.

The renaming came first. The ban is just the paperwork catching up.

Now do the audit - follow the credential. It doesn’t go to the best questioner anymore. It goes to the best flatterer. The outlets still inside aren’t there to report. They’re there to be seen being allowed. A permitted press isn’t a press. It’s a stenographer with a lanyard.

And he calls it “expanding voices.” Decompress that. Expanding means loyal. Voices means megaphones.

The founders wrote “the press” and they meant a machine - iron, ink, some man cranking it in a basement while the sheriff rode out to seize it. They’d watched governments operate unwitnessed, and they wrote the machine into the law. You can keep a machine out of a room. The ink is harder.

So now one man decides which note-takers stand in the hallway, and the note-takers left inside call it a bigger tent. It’s not a tent. It’s a fishbowl, and he feeds them by hand.

Freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns one. He owns the room. He owns the hallway.

He’s working on the ink.