Vito Quiles is not CNN, but…

Two news stories that can be related coincide on a single day. Trump has banned journalists from CNN, Politico, and MS Now from White House grounds, and Congress has revoked Vito Quiles' accreditation. I assume we all understand that the first case is unacceptable and that the reason given by the American president, stating the measure is taken because these media outlets published too many negative stories about him, emits a pungent dictatorial stench. On the other hand, in the second case, there was an abuse and usurpation by someone who spuriously invoked the rights of journalists to carry out their picturesque political activism based on constant, intolerable harassment.

However, the Quiles precedent is dangerous, because other governments when they come to power—and they will—will have the temptation to invoke it to justify their vetoes based on personal preferences or political grudges. To avoid this, the regulations governing how press accreditations are distributed must be very well structured. And this can only be done by taking on the debate about which objective criteria define who is a journalist and who performs other activities, perhaps legitimate but not holders of the citizenry's right to be informed. It plays in favor of democracy to avoid the distortions of political battering rams, poor devils, and one man shows who stage a scene and, instead of asking questions, declaim their particular editorials to ensure their minute of glory and trashiness on social media. But it is a double-edged sword. In the United States, by the way, the conservative Fox News has supported the protest boycott by news channels against Trump and has refused to use the images that now arrive without mediation through the institutional channel. Would a similar consensus be possible here, to defend the basic right to plant a camera in front of power?