Orangeman Legerdemain

Op-EdWe at Courthouse News have won First Amendment cases over delays in access to news. The press would have standing to challenge the presidential sale of immediate access to news.Part of the fun of being in the news is the racing. The bureau chiefs at Courthouse News are properly proud when our reporters beat the big shot newspapers on breaking news, even by a couple minutes. And these days, if you are a couple hours behind, well, your work is not worth much. The news cycle has moved on.So I was surprised to hear a CNN legal analyst say that a news organization did not have standing to sue our president over the sale of early access to his pronouncements on his social media service.Newspapers, wire services, any kind of news organization sells subscriptions and ads to make a profit. They are selling access. But the government is not a private business, not normally.So we at Courthouse News have spent a king’s ransom on First Amendment cases against court clerks over access to court pleadings when they cross the now-virtual counter. That is exactly the nature of our many battles — we challenge the delay some clerks enforce on access to pleadings.The story goes back to the days of paper. So I often come back to a from-the-bench comment by a robed figure who was a lawyer back in those days.“There was a time when — and some in this room may remember it — when you took a pleading to the courthouse and the clerk stamped it physically and it went into different bins and it was available immediately,” said Eighth Circuit Judge Bobby Shepherd.Since time out of memory, public statements from a president about war and economic policy have been distributed widely and “available immediately.”But the current newsmaker-in-chief would enforce a delay on access for anybody unwilling to pay roughly $100,000 a month. That payment would give immediate access to his social media statements, ahead of all others.It is a little clever for his folks to call it “early access,” like a sneak peak, but, flipped around, the presidential scheme to make a few million dollars more gives immediate access to those who pay and the rest of the chumps get the news later, when it has acquired a bit of staleness.We have faced standing challenges but they are usually overcome fairly summarily. A pleading, like a presidential announcement, can and does generate news. So a news organization would have standing, just as we do, to challenge delays in access to news.By that bit of news legerdemain — a word I love because it literally means “light of hand” — the president is simply adding more millions of dollars into his personal cache.In a different but related news vein, elections are coming up. A journalist, Maggie Haberman, said in an interview with columnist Ezra Klein a couple weeks ago that the president doesn’t care about them. He is mostly focused on his building projects.When I watch the news in the evening, that observation seems to explain much about the political activity from the White House.If the elections were to result in an across-the-board wipeout for the Republican Party, it would not affect the president’s conduct greatly. He has adopted policy mostly by fiat and pursued self-enrichment without consequence or even much opprobrium.In a related trend in the news, some of those upcoming elections are having a lot to do with data centers. In turn, how the centers are seen is tied to how the AI tech titans are seen.One of our directors told me that a family member said he was going to vote against any local politician who had approved the building of a regional data center. The data center, however, was in the next county over so he could not express his anger through the ballot box.But plenty of folks are able to vote on the issue and it is powerful enough that Republican candidates are pushing to catch up with Democratic politicians who are ahead on that topic.Connected to that is the growing understanding by the general public that AI may not be as good for their economic wellbeing as it is for that of the tech bros.At the same time, consumer spending has not gone down and the economy seems to be pumping away. So while an election wipeout for the party in power seems to be in the cards, I’m not betting on it just yet.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads