Last week, our president banned three news outlets from the White House: CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. Journalists from each organization tried to access their usual posts inside the White House over the weekend and they were turned away by the Secret Service, who took away their press passes because this administration believes, in their words, “White House Access Is a Privilege — Not a Right.” The three organizations are now suing the White House to regain access, in keeping with the First Amendment.

Any time press freedom comes up in the news, I pay attention.

This little spat is particularly egregious to me. The president has cherry-picked a few viewpoints that make him uncomfortable and cast them out of his house, which is blatantly discriminatory. It’s scary how easy it is for him to surround himself only with heads that nod.

This has me thinking back to the Marion County Record, which I visited just about a month ago in Kansas. This was the newspaper that got raided by the local police department and had all their equipment seized, because they had used publicly available police data to verify an (unpublished) story. This, they wrongly asserted, was illegal.

The Record committed no crime. CNN, MS NOW, and Politico haven’t either.

When I was traveling from newspaper to newspaper this summer, sometimes editors would flip the conversation around and ask about me. Being journalists, it was only natural. I was most commonly asked why I chose to be a journalist at such a challenging point for the profession. Why now, when the news is distrusted by the authorities and the public, when the content we make gets mixed up in an ever-widening sea of truth, half-truth, and lie?

I usually said something about believing in discourse. I would say I didn’t want to live in a cocoon, where an algorithm would define my worldview and reinforce it, blocking out anything that doesn’t fit. The White House is being turned into a cocoon, an unconstitutional one, and I hope the courts are swift in bringing him back to democratic reality.

In the face of all this, the only thing I can think to do is write more. My writerly friends have vowed to do this with me, so for the remainder of 2026 we are committed to nothing but quantity. Writers are the enemy? Fine, we’ll double down.

Our ambitions are in early stages, but all of us are at points in our lives where our energy needs channeling. We’ve got dead-end jobs (I am now a restaurant hostess) and things to say. A ban on certain journalists in none other than the White House is perhaps the impetus we needed. Maybe some of you will join me in writing the truth as resistance. It is the method I know best, all the way back to my days running the Devil’s Advocate at Ellenville High School.

Our eyes, these days, are best kept open.