A social media comment about President Donald Trump banning The Associated Press from the Oval Office raised a question of whether America really ever has had a free or independent press.

The opinion was that the AP and much of the press are not free from bias and thus not independent in news reporting.

The First Amendment provides the individual citizens freedom to ask such questions and have such opinions. But the law importantly prohibits governmental retaliation limiting such individual freedom.  

This is the same freedom the AP and all in the press have to report the news without the reprisal the president has done in ordering the news service banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One.

This reprisal is a violation of the First Amendment — as the AP has defended in court to end the restriction and allow its free flow of reporting to resume.

In Nevada, The Elko Daily Free Press, aptly named for a couple centuries, is, in fact, free to report on the Elko mayor without being banned at a city hall office. 

The new era online The Nevada Independent, affectionately called the "Indy" by its readers, is, in fact, independent of the governor of Nevada who cannot ban it from the state Capitol office.

The First Amendment guarantees these public officers cannot restrict journalists because they don't like news coverage.

They cannot do so because of this law vital to all Americans.

The First Amendment was established in the creation of the United States to restrict Congress, and it has been extended to restrict all 50 states, against censoring freedom of expression in speech, press, religion, assembly and the right to petition the government over grievances. 

No president, or mayor or governor, can legally do what the current president is doing to the AP — or to any other journalist or news organization — without violating the First Amendment.

President John F. Kennedy canceled his subscription to the New York Herald Tribune because he didn't like it. But he didn't ban the newspaper from reporting from the Oval Office.

President Richard Nixon chose to read what he considered the friendly Washington Star but he did not ban The Washington Post from Air Force One.

Americans of all political persuasions, friend or foe, whether they get their news or information on the radio, from TV, over the internet, in newspapers or magazines or across the fence from their next door neighbor, should stand for these First Freedoms today if we are to believe in the America we define as a democracy.

These are the guarantees that no matter what a president dislikes, he or she will never be able to restrict the news Americans can read, write or think about.

In so far as The Associated Press itself is concerned, whatever anyone may wish to opine, the AP has been covering presidents, Republican and Democrat, since 1846, through 180 years of war, peace, slavery and civil rights, the development of everything from the telegraph to the trans-Atlantic cable and our man on the moon. It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan global news organization that provides information to over 4 billion readers every day.  It is regarded as the gold standard of impartial coverage by media of every stripe who often are in conflict with each other but together rely on the AP for factual news. 

To ban the AP is to restrict its vital flow of news that a sharply diversified world requires at the moment the high-speed, high-quality news service reports it.

Warren Lerude is professor emeritus of the Reynolds School of Journalism at UNR and former editor and publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The Nevada Independent welcomes informed, cogent rebuttals to opinion pieces such as this. Send them to [email protected].