Ugh. Libertarians—can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em (but it’s sure worth trying). Reason, the often helpful and provocative libertarian mag and website, has aligned itself with the Trump Deranged and Axis for predictable reasons: Joe Biden is its ideal as a POTUS, a vegetable that makes Calvin Coolidge look like FDR. Libertarians don’t like strong Presidents, because they don’t like Presidential power, which means they don’t like the Constitution when you get right down to it. Reason likes open borders, for example, which pretty much disqualifies its writers and pundits for anything but giggles. Abortion. Addictive drugs.
Include me out, as Sam Goldwyn used to say.
Now Robby Soave is complaining about what I touched on in this post yesterday…
Robby complains, in “Terry Moran Insulted Stephen Miller? That’s None of the Government’s Business,” that this is the government putting unconstitutional pressure on “the press” to censor its reporting.
Soave writes,
This is a textbook example of “jawboning”—when the government tries to accomplish some censorship by threatening improper government action. It is exactly the sort of thing that conservatives rightly hated about the previous administration: President Joe Biden, his senior advisors, and various federal employees browbeat social media companies into taking down content that the feds deemed wrong, hateful, or dangerous. They didn’t just say that they disagreed with major platform moderation policies: They raised the possibility of punitive legislation against Facebook, Google, and Twitter unless they complied.
Leavitt is free to complain about Moran’s comment, as Vance did. But her insinuation that she would be speaking with Moran’s manager reads like a threat, and thus like an attempt at censorship. As Jenin Younes, a civil liberties attorney, noted in a reply to Leavitt, the Trump administration issued an executive order to prevent the kind of jawboning that took place under the previous White House. To turn around and do the same thing is obviously hypocritical.
But what Leavitt did is not what the Biden administration did. It is, rather, related to Trump’s lawsuit against CBS for its dishonest editing of the Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes,” and its decision to exclude the biased Associated Press from some press briefings as a result of the AP’s clear hostility to this President and Republicans generally.
Moran’s tweet proves that the senior correspondent responsible for White House coverage has a personal bias that renders him unable to report fairly and honestly. The White House has not only a right but the obligation to inform ABC that such open bias on the part of its staff is unacceptable, and undermines democracy. If you deem it acceptable, Leavitt’s response suggests, then we will have to take appropriate action. Journalists are not supposed to behave as partisan foes of the President or any other elected official. ABC can allow its Terry Morans to represent it in its “journalism,” but such a choice will and ought to have consequences. ABC will have announced by that decision that it is untrustworthy and the enemy of the democratic process—an enemy of the people, in fact.
Leavitt’s position is not hypocritical, but responsible. The White House isn’t demanding that ABC not publish critical reports, but that ABC employ journalists who haven’t shown themselves incapable of being fair, objective, and accurate.
Ethics Alarms 
“The First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an amendment essential to the success of our Republic, enshrines the right of the American people to speak freely in the public square without Government interference.” Thus wrote President Trump in Executive Order 14149 dated January 20, 2025.
Terry Moran, writing as a private citizen (@TerryMoran), posted an ugly, hateful message on X, denigrating both the President and a White House Official.
The official spokesperson of the President then posted on X, from her official position (@PressSec), that we (meaning the Administration) “have reached out to @ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry accountable”.
That is an implied threat from the Administration to a news media organization. One need only recall what happened to The Associated Press for not using the term “The Gulf of America” in its style guide. As several noted at the time of that controversy, news media outlets have no right of access to the Oval Office or Air Force One, and the AP ban has been upheld by the most recent court ruling. There is no doubt that action had an adverse impact on the AP’s ability to do first-hand news reporting. ABC could be treated in a similar manner if it did not “hold Terry accountable” in a manner pleasing to the Administration.
A fundamental concept of a free press is that it is up to the news media to decide who they employ and what the conditions of that employment are, including what those employees do on their own time. The Administration, as it did, should have made it clear that the personal post reflected extreme bias, but it had no business going beyond that.