Newsmax CEO says he asked Trump to ‘reconsider’ White House media outlet bans

Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy on Tuesday said he asked President Trump to reconsider his ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW reporters from covering his administration and the White House.

“I’ve urged the president to reconsider his position,” Ruddy told “BBC Newsnight” in an interview. “I hope he will. I think it would be a smart decision going forward. As much as he may be justified by what he feels is very biased reporting, I think we should always err on the side of the constitutional freedoms.”

Ruddy said he thinks Trump is “right [in] that they’re not necessarily honest and fair.”

“Well, the Constitution doesn’t protect fair and honest reporting,” he added. “It only protects the free press and being a press owner or certainly only a public company or being the head of a public company here that’s a media company.”

Ruddy made similar remarks to The New York Times , saying the ban “would set a bad precedent for all media, including conservative outlets like Newsmax.”

“Newsmax asked tough questions during both the Obama and Biden administrations, and at no point did anyone suggest that we might be banned,” Ruddy told the Times.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., appeared skeptical of Trump’s ban on the reporters. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said in response to the outlets’ lawsuit against the administration that due process “wasn’t followed here.”

Trump issued his ban on reporters from the three outlets last Friday, accusing them of “fake news,” with reporters losing their passes while on White House grounds the next day. All three outlets sued the administration on Monday, arguing it is violating the First Amendment and harming their ability to share information about the government with the public.

Attorneys for all three outlets jointly argued that the ban “could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles.”

Trump defended the ban as not being “an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish.”

“It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

The Department of Justice said it stands by the president’s ban and called access to the White House complex a “privilege.” The department argued that the administration saw what it described as failures to meet basic standards of “professionalism and decorum” and to protect “sensitive or classified information” from being published by the press.

Other news outlets condemned the ban, including contributors at Fox News. Major TV networks on Monday pulled from the White House pool covering Trump for wider media distribution in solidarity with their CNN, Politico and MS NOW peers.