Shoresy wrote:
What are you expecting a judge to rule? That every person in the country has access to your president's house at any time?
Sherrill v. Knight (D.C. Circuit, 1977) is the closest case I pulled up, the judge never ordered access, and Sherrill never got access after the case was won.
Oh c'mon, you can come up with plenty of precedents that are more relevant, here's a few:
Adolf Hitler: Suppressed the Free Press in Germany from 1933 to 1945.imposing total state control over all newspapers, radio, and publishing to entirely eradicate independent journalism which he labeled “Lügenpresse” (The Lying Press).
Joseph Stalin: Suppressed the Free Press in the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until 1953 by executing journalists and enforcing strict ideological conformity through censorship bodies like Glavlit and centralized propaganda media organizations like Pravda.
Benito Mussolini: Suppressed the Free Press in Italy from 1922 to 1943 systematically suppressing freedom of the press through a series of increasingly restrictive laws, direct censorship, and the forced alignment of journalists with the Fascist regime. After silencing independent press, he built a personal state propaganda network.
Francisco Franco (Spain): Imposed absolute censorship on publications, cultural events, and the media from the Spanish Civil War until his death in 1975.
Vladimir Putin (Russia): Imprisoned political rivals, banned independent broadcasting networks, and criminalized independent reporting deemed to be against the regime.
Viktor Orbán (Hungary): Methodically placed a stranglehold on independent journalism to build a dominant state-aligned media universe.
Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines): Shut down independent media outlets upon declaring martial law in 1972, seizing broadcast networks and placing them under the control of his family and political cronies.
Kim Jong Un / Kim family (North Korea): Maintains complete state ownership and strict censorship of all television, radio, and print media, ranking near the absolute bottom of the World Press Freedom Index.
Bashar al-Assad (Syria): Controls state media and systematically targets, detains, or kills independent journalists reporting negatively on regime activities.
"If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That's how dictators get started, they get started by suppressing free press." John McCain - US Senator