Networks pick their guests, drop the ones they don’t like, and expect to be thanked. When the White House does the same, it’s an assault on the press.
Watch any interview on cable news and you’ll see the same ritual. Every guest genuflects before the host. “Thanks for having me.” “Great to be with you.” “Always a pleasure.”
Even the biggest names do it. Senators, cabinet officials, authors at the top of the bestseller list. People who could fill any studio in the country still open with the thank-you. So do the host’s favorites, the regulars who are on every week and have nothing left to prove. They thank the host the loudest.
It doesn’t stop at hello. Once the segment starts, the guest agrees. “That’s exactly right.” “Great point.” The host offers a take, the guest hands it back in slightly different words, and both call it analysis.
Some of it is manners. You see it on the network news and on some guy’s podcast out of his spare bedroom. But the incentive is the same everywhere: the host decides whether there’s a next time. The bigger the audience, the more the next time is worth, and the heavier the deference gets.
And it isn’t one host’s door. Bookers talk. A guest who argues with a host or shows one up on air gets a reputation as difficult, and the reputation travels. Embarrass one host and you’ve made yourself hard to book on everyone else’s show too.
Now imagine the White House required the same of reporters. No hard pass unless every question opens with “Mr. President, we love you.” The press would go ballistic. There would be lawsuits by lunch.
The networks already run that system. They just call it booking.
The Seat Is the Paycheck
Start with what the news is: a business. It sells ads, subscriptions and cable fees, and it books whatever keeps the audience watching. “Journalism” is how the business describes itself. It’s a claim, not a credential, and the way to test it is to watch what the business does. Even the Times now grows on Wordle, recipes, sports and product reviews, which is why I asked whether the New York Times is still a newspaper.
News divisions don’t pay ordinary guests. The airtime is the payment. A guest gets exposure for a book, a campaign, a consulting practice, a career. A booker controls who gets it.
I argued in Freedom of the Press Is Not a Reserved Seat that the White House owes no reporter a seat. The same holds in the other direction. A network owes no guest a booking. Whether the White House can pull hard passes, the courts are still sorting out.
The question is whether the press lives by the rule it demands of everyone else.
Who Gets Invited
It doesn’t. Researchers have checked. A 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tracked the political leanings of the people cable news put on screen from 2010 to 2021. After 2016, Fox’s lineup ran steadily more conservative, and CNN’s and MSNBC’s steadily more liberal. Each network invites its own side, and its own side thanks it for coming.
Who Gets Thrown Out
In March 2024, NBC News hired Ronna McDaniel, the former Republican National Committee chair, as a paid contributor. Within days, the network’s own anchors took to the air to denounce the hire. Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough. Four days later she was gone.
The head of NBC’s news division explained why in a memo to staff: “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned.”
Hold that next to the White House. When the President banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico on September 18, the three outlets sued three days later. “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment,” the lawsuit says. The White House answered with a press release titled “White House access is a privilege—not a right.”
Nobody is suppressing the press, as I pointed out in Freedom of the Press Is Not a Reserved Seat. They can still write whatever they want.
NBC runs on the same principle. A contributor’s chair is a privilege, not a right, and McDaniel lost hers in four days. NBC’s defenders say her conduct disqualified her. The White House says the same about its bans: the outlets, Trump wrote, “constantly write or report fiction and lies.” Either conduct can cost you a seat or it can’t. The press claims the power for itself and denies it to everyone else.
The Shield
There’s one more asymmetry. The press answers to almost no public figure for what it says. Since New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964 and the cases that followed it, a public figure who sues for defamation has to prove the outlet knew the story was false or recklessly didn’t care. Honest mistakes, even careless ones, aren’t enough for a public figure to win. The occasional nine-figure settlement makes news because it’s rare.
So the press holds the gate, sets the terms of entry, collects the thank-you, and is nearly immune to losing a lawsuit to the people it covers most. That’s a lot of power for an institution whose whole brand is holding power accountable.
Honest Caveats
Not every host books only friends, and not every guest is a courtier. The hard-news hours are far less skewed than primetime. Audiences reward agreement, so part of this is the networks giving viewers what they pay for. And the thank-you, taken alone, is often just courtesy. The argument isn’t that manners are sinister. It’s that the press already practices, quietly, the access politics it denounces loudly when someone else does it.
If I Were King
The briefing room works like a cartel. The big outlets hold the front rows, and for decades the incumbents’ own association decided who sat where and who rotated into the pool. When one member gets squeezed, the rest close ranks. After the CNN ban, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News all refused to replace CNN’s pool crew. Fox included.
If I were king, I’d take away every permanent network seat in the briefing room and put them on rotation among the thousands of journalists and newspapers in this country. The small-town daily, the trade reporter, the freelancer with a newsletter. Everybody gets a turn. Nobody owns a chair.
The networks would hate it. Which tells you how much they believe in open access when the access is theirs.
Do Unto Others
Swap the chairs. Give Trump his own show and book the White House press corps as his guests. To get invited back, they’d have to thank him for having them, nod along, and tell him what a great point he just made. That’s the deal every cable guest takes tonight.