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Around 10am on August 21, a police sergeant responded to a call suggesting that a trespasser was refusing to leave a Republican event at the Hawk Pointe Golf Club in Washington, New Jersey. That morning, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was attending a fundraiser at Hawk Pointe with Thomas Kean Jr., the United States representative for New Jersey’s seventh congressional district, who is now up for reelection in a closely watched race. The officer thought he might have to pull someone out; he wondered whether to call for backup. But what he found surprised him. “What’s going on?” he asked Harrison Neely, a spokesman for Kean. “Basically what happened,” Neely said, according to police bodycam footage I watched of the incident, “is there’s a reporter who is not invited.”

The officer went off to investigate. In the parking lot he found Tracey Tully, a New York Times reporter who covers New Jersey, waiting with a pen and pad. She had asked to enter the event, but had been told that it was private and members of the media were not welcome, she later said, even though journalists from Fox News and WFMZ were inside. Contrary to what Neely claimed, she said, no one had asked her to leave. In the bodycam video, I could see that the officer laughed awkwardly, seemingly confounded that police had been called to deal with the situation. He walked inside to get more details. Neely can be heard in the video explaining that he’d been told Tully “was lurking.” He adds: “Lurking is a harsh word. She was on the premises looking to do an interview, and that she was not welcome, and we think that some of the folks were uncomfortable having her here. It just kind of escalated into: let’s get rid of her.”

Tully wrote about the incident for the Times, describing it as an “unusual police intervention.” Even so, she noted, it was not exactly out of character for Kean’s office. Kean is notoriously media-avoidant, does not release his schedule publicly, and disappeared from view this year for nearly four months, a period during which, he later said, he had been hospitalized for depression. But calling the police was an escalation even for him. (Neither Kean’s office nor Neely responded to requests for comment over the weekend; the Times declined to make Tully available for an interview.) What happened at Hawk Pointe that morning, though, is far from a one-off. It’s part of a pattern in which politicians at the national, state, and local levels have sought to exclude, dodge, or eject journalists as they try to report on public figures.

On July 18 in Waynesville, North Carolina, a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times—part of the USA Today Network, and owned and operated by Gannett—said he was “physically blocked entry” to a campaign event for Michael Whatley, a Republican Senate candidate. Even though the event was non-ticketed and publicly advertised, according to the Citizen-Times, the campaign called 911 on the reporter, who was also threatened with a lawsuit. (“Seeking to avoid dangerous escalation,” the Citizen-Times wrote, the reporter chose to leave once police officers arrived.) The Citizen-Times called this “part of a pattern of restricted press access,” following a similar incident on July 9. That day, several reporters said they were denied entry to a campaign event in Raleigh. “Left-wing activists, like you, posing as ‘journalists’ already have their narrative written,” DJ Griffin, a spokesperson for Whatley’s campaign, told NC Newsline—part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit—in an email. “Whether they’re inside the event or standing on the sidewalk makes no difference. They’ll publish the same garbage and lies either way.”

On October 13, at a public briefing in Cambridge, Maryland, Andy Harris, a congressman from Maryland, told Cat Murphy—a journalism graduate student at the University of Maryland, credentialed as a reporter for the Capital News Service—“I’m disinviting you.” During their exchange, filmed by the Baltimore Banner, Harris accused Murphy of breaking the law by recording him—citing the state’s two-party-consent law, which only applies to private conversations—and called for a police officer to take her, and her camera, away. (In the end, Harris stomped off.) And a few days later, on October 20, Tommy Tuberville, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alabama, had law enforcement remove a reporter from a public campaign event in Mobile. The reporter had been trying to ask a question; a member of Tuberville’s campaign staff whistled over to the county sheriff’s deputies; out the reporter went.

Although Republicans have been responsible for most of these recent incidents, at least one Democratic politician has joined in. In February, Jasmine Crockett, the congresswoman from Texas, called US Capitol Police on Edward-Isaac Dovere, a CNN reporter, for trespassing when he attempted to visit one of her offices, Semafor reported. Later that month The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey was ejected from a rally for Crockett’s Senate campaign. “She’s a top-notch hater and will spin. She needs to leave,” Godfrey was told Crockett’s team had said of her, according to audio published by The Atlantic. Police were not called, but “armed security guards escorted me from the property,” Godfrey later wrote.

Even when these confrontations don’t result in a police response, they suggest a trend: reporting on public political events is increasingly viewed, at least in some quarters, as a crime. And even when reporting is not treated like an offense, we’re seeing some politicians behave as if engaging with the press on basic questions of transparency is optional. Where, I wonder, have we seen this attitude before? It is a state of affairs brought to you—and all of us—by Donald Trump, those who enabled him, and those who, out of fear or complacency, did not push back. 

Since retaking the White House, at the start of last year, Trump and his administration have pressured, bullied, sued, and blocked journalists whose coverage they find unpalatable. They have arrested or raided a few undesirables, too, while welcoming pliant content creators who won’t ask tough questions. Most recently, the Trump administration has tried to ban CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House and floated the idea of removing the White House press room altogether. In 2016, the US ranked forty-first out of a hundred and eighty countries on the Reporters Without Borders global press freedom index; ten years later, it has slid to sixty-fourth place, between Botswana and Panama. On Tuesday, millions of Americans casting their ballots are likely to give Trump and the Republican Party a bloody nose. But on Wednesday, we will still wake up to the political and journalistic sphere the American president helped create.

Some contend that, if the rot is emanating from the top, maybe repair can begin there, too. Last Monday, Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute and Yale’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Trump administration on behalf of six individual readers of White House coverage. They are challenging Trump’s ban on press access, alleging that it violates the First Amendment. This suit is separate from the one brought by CNN, MS Now, and Politico against Donald Trump and members of his administration, which aims to restore permanent access for the seventy-eight journalists Trump has tried to expel. Last week, the news outlets’ suit was expanded to target restrictions that have hampered pooled TV and print reporting by the disfavored organizations. 

That August day in Washington, New Jersey, Tully cleared up the situation with the cop, and stuck around. (The amiable officer told Tully he was surprised the “unwanted party” turned out to be “a nice little reporter, just waiting to get an interview.” Neely eventually apologized to the officer, the bodycam video shows, and said it was fine for Tully to wait in the parking lot.) She found it was worth her time. When Johnson was leaving Hawk Pointe, she managed to flag him down. In the end, he even answered a few questions.

Other Notable Stories … 
By Jem Bartholomew

• On Saturday, Judge Darrin Gayles, of the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, dismissed Trump’s lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for a second time, saying that his defamation claims in relation to the Journal’s reporting about an apparent birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein “lack merit.” Gayles said Trump’s allegations were “conclusory, vague, sometimes inconsistent with the article, and often irrelevant” to the argument that the report was motivated by actual malice. The case was previously dismissed in April, but Trump was allowed to refile. According to the Journal, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said he would appeal the ruling.

• Cecilia Vega, a former correspondent at 60 Minutes who was fired earlier this year as part of plans by Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief, to remake the network, called her dismissal, and those of several others at CBS, “exceptionally disturbing.” Vega said that, while still at 60 Minutes, she was “told to put information that is just factually untrue in a piece of journalism,” according to a write-up from The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr of comments given at an American University event in DC on Thursday. Vega added that watching the changes at CBS from afar “pains me,” and it “hurts to see the ratings slump that is happening right now.” (Audience figures have fallen far below last season’s average of 9.1 million viewers.) Meanwhile, speaking at an industry conference on Wednesday, Weiss defended her changes and said 60 Minutes was doing “tremendously well.”

• In Russia, one of the country’s best-known media outlets, Novaya Gazeta, announced it will permanently close this month. Sergei Sokolov, the editor in chief, said the newspaper’s story mirrors “the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed.” Shaun Walker, writing in The Guardian, said that “while Novaya always swam against a tide of repression, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made independent reporting almost impossible and decimated the Russian media landscape.”

• Life magazine, which was founded by Henry Luce in 1936, is restarting as a quarterly print title on November 23. The magazine was known for its bold visual storytelling, but its regular publication ended in 2000. Life’s resurrection—featuring more than a hundred and twenty contributors in the first issue, according to the New York Times’ Katie Robertson—is backed by Karlie Kloss, the entrepreneur and model, through her company Bedford Media, which also owns the magazines i-D and W. The first issue will cost forty-five dollars.

• And Birds of War, a Sundance prizewinning documentary, opens at IFC Center in New York on November 4. The film follows a Lebanese journalist and a Syrian activist-cameraman over thirteen years, as they cover conflicts in the Middle East together and fall in love. On November 7 at 6:30pm, Betsy Morais, the editor in chief of CJR, will participate in a special screening of the film at IFC, followed by a Q&A.

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