in other words, continue this fight. that s up to the white house now. and we ll see what they do. you think there s a chance i guess it would be considered settling out of court. absolutely. the sensible resolution here is simply for the white house to say, look, okay. we made our point. but here s your press pass. let s go forward. instead, they could say well, the judge said we need to set up a procedure. we re going to set up a procedure, and we re still going to try to take your press pass away. one of the important things we have seen come out has been the number of news organizations that have come forward in supporting cnn s decision. is there any indication that that support, those friends of the filings have weighed on the judge at least in how he s decided this initial step? we didn t hear a lot from him about that in court, but it is quite possible. c n cnn s out with a statement thanking all the other news outlets for standing up not just
it, and i am impressed by the savvy the judge showed here. because what he said was, look, i am not ruling on the broad issue here about whether there is a first amendment right in total. but he accepted cnn s argument that if you are going to take away a hard pass, you have to have standards for what justifies taking it away. you have to have a clear process for who decides on what basis that a hard pass can be taken away. so now, the result of this ruling is that the white house is going to have a decision to make. they are going to have to say, look, we are either going to call jim acosta in and shake hands and say look, we had a disagreement, but let s move forward. that to me would be a sensible resolution. or, they can say we are establishing a procedure and we re going to try to take your hard pass away based on what you did, but with an appropriate decisionmaking process.
eligible, that have those hard passes, it didn t matter. in this case, this was about an individual journalist, about an individual journalist s rights, the due process rights and whether or not those were violated. in which case the judge said there was the likelihood of success they would prove the due process rights were violated. but it didn t matter that cnn has a whole cadre of journalists, photojournalists, reporters, producers. what mattered was jim acosta as an individual journalist and the fact his due process rights were likely violated here. that he didn t get the opportunity to be heard or there wasn t any clear notification. and there wasn t it was unclear who exactly made this decision. the reasoning from the government, from the white house, was jumbled. the judge did reference that as well. he said initially, sarah sanders mentioned that jim acosta had placed his hands on that intern who tried to take the microphone away. but then the judge also noted that in later s
this judge, extremely succinct and straightforward with this ruling and noting he wasn t going very broadly with this ruling but he was in fact granting a victory to cnn and our chief white house correspondent jim acosta. saying that the white house must immediately restore jim acosta s hard pass that allows him access to the white house on a daily basis. so this judge taking it very narrowly. this was just this emergency ruling. this was on the temporary restraining order that would restore jim acosta s pass for the short period of time while the litigation moves forward. there s the broader issue here, whether or not the first amendment, what rights there are within the white house grounds. the government in that hearing on wednesday made that very broad argument that really the first amendment protections do not extend within the white house grounds and that the president, they said, has broad range to tell which reporters he will take questions from and to
what makes america different than other places around the world is that we do operate with a free, fair, and open press. and we have to protect that. i think we have to you know, it s important for folks to have a great working relationship with reporters, but fake news is dangerous. when journalists and folks are literally putting their lives on the line across the world, when people, jamal khashoggi, he lost his life for speaking out and telling the truth and being critical with his words on paper. this is serious business. and i think it s very dangerous for the administration to be trafficking in this conspiracy theory, if you will, of fake news. the thing is i can t disagree more with that. let s be honest here. journalists have to protect journalism. we all know because cnn, i understand, i work here and i know they work very hard to get it accurate, but let me just be honest. there are lots of news networks out there in this new media world where like breitbart?