There Is a Government Website That Names Reporters as Media Offenders. Most Americans Have No Idea.
Right now, on an official United States government website funded by taxpayers, there is a page that names specific American news agencies and journalists, and brands them as media offenders.
Not a campaign site. Not a political action committee. The White House. Whitehouse.gov. The building your taxes pay for.
Most Americans have no idea this page exists. That changes today, because once you see it, you will not unsee it.
Go look. The address is whitehouse.gov/mediabias. The banner reads “Media Offenders.” The tagline reads “Misleading. Biased. Exposed.”
Then keep reading, because the damage runs deeper than one ugly webpage.
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT BUILT
The page went live the weekend after Thanksgiving 2025. Its first weekly entry is dated November 28. It works like a wanted board for the press.
At the top sits a rotating “Media Offender of the Week.” The government picks an outlet and a reporter, prints their names, prints the claim it dislikes, and stamps its own version of “The Truth” beneath a heading that reads “The Offense.”
Below that runs an “Offender Hall of Shame,” a searchable database of stories the administration has flagged. Each entry tags the outlet, the reporter, and a category of wrongdoing. The labels include bias, lie, malpractice, omission of context, mischaracterization, clickbait, and one the government literally calls “Left-Wing Lunacy.”
There is a Leaderboard that ranks news organizations by volume of alleged offenses, like a sports standings table for shaming the press. The administration’s own description calls it “a race to the bottom.”
There is a “Repeat Offenders” chart for outlets the government says keep getting it wrong.
The list of named publications reads like a directory of American journalism. The Associated Press. Reuters. Bloomberg. CNN. CBS. NBC. The New York Times. The Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal. The BBC. Even Fox News and the conservative Daily Signal show up when a story displeases the White House.
In June 2026 the page expanded past newsrooms into a category called “Leftist Influencers.” It started naming individual online commentators such as Brian Tyler Cohen and David Pakman, accusing private citizens of spreading false claims about the President. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office flagged that the targets also swept in figures like Don Lemon and Stephen Colbert.
Then there is the part that should chill you most. The page hosts a “Report Bias” tipline. The government asks the public to submit articles for the list. A federal administration is recruiting ordinary Americans to inform on reporters, by name, on government property.
Read the language the page uses about the people it targets. It calls a physician a “charlatan.” It calls a medical opinion “moronic.” It nicknames CNN’s Jake Tapper “Fake Tapper.” This is the official voice of the United States government, written in the cadence of an anonymous troll account.
WHERE THE LAW BREAKS
I have spent my career in courtrooms. When I first heard of this story and then read this page as a lawyer, my stomach turned, and here is the precise reason.
This isn’t normal. It reminds me of a powerful chapter from the authoritarian playbook. Seriously, I’m not exaggerating.
But first, let’s start with the honest part. A President is allowed to talk back. When the government disputes a story, even loudly and one-sidedly, courts treat that as government speech. The problem with this page is not that the White House voiced an opinion. The problem is what it built on top of that opinion.
The Supreme Court drew the line in 1963 in Bantam Books v. Sullivan. A state commission had circulated lists of publications it deemed objectionable, backed by the quiet threat of official consequences. The Court struck it down. Government cannot accomplish through intimidation what the Constitution forbids it to do by direct order.1
The Court sharpened that line again in 2024, unanimously, in NRA v. Vullo. Justice Sotomayor wrote that a government official violates the First Amendment by using the power of the office to coerce others into punishing disfavored speech, and that the rule reaches indirect pressure through private middlemen as much as direct censorship. The opinion lays out what a court weighs: the official’s authority, the words chosen, whether a reasonable listener hears a threat of consequences, and whether speech gets suppressed.2
Now apply that to this page. The “offender” branding and the public tipline do not stand alone. They stand next to lawsuits this same administration has filed against CBS, ABC, and the Wall Street Journal. They stand next to FCC licensing pressure. They stand next to decisions about who gets a White House press pass. One fact gives the coercion argument teeth: the page lists Apple News, Google, and MSN for the offense of promoting outlets the government dislikes. That is the government aiming its apparatus at the platforms that carry the news, the exact fact pattern the Court condemned in Bantam Books.
There is a second claim, for retaliation. A journalist who suffers a real consequence after being listed, a pulled credential, an advertiser walking away, a platform downranking them, has a strong case. The administration handed over the hardest element for free. When a government sorts reporters into a folder labeled “Left-Wing Lunacy,” it has confessed its motive in writing.
There is a third claim, about access, and it carries a warning the rest of the press should hear. Courts held in Sherrill v. Knight that the White House cannot deny a press pass for arbitrary or viewpoint-based reasons. The Associated Press tested that principle in 2025 after the administration barred its reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One over the wire service’s refusal to adopt the name “Gulf of America.” In April 2025, a federal district judge appointed by President Trump ruled for the AP, found it likely to win on its First Amendment viewpoint-discrimination and retaliation claims, and ordered access restored.3
Then the ground shifted. In June 2025, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit stayed that order. The two judges in the majority, both Trump appointees, held that spaces like the Oval Office and Air Force One are not open public forums, so the White House keeps discretion over who it admits, including by viewpoint. The full court declined to rehear the matter in July 2025. The dissenting judge warned that this reasoning lets a sitting administration punish journalists for coverage it dislikes, and that every reporter in the room would think twice before publishing something the President might resent.
Read that last line again, because it is the whole game. A court has now written down, out loud, the exact chilling effect this list is built to produce. The fight is not over, and a piece of the AP’s win survived as to other White House spaces. The takeaway holds: the courts are split, the press is losing ground, and the administration is testing how far the law will bend.
I will be straight about the weak spots, because credibility demands it. A reporter who can say only “I was named and now I feel nervous” runs into Laird v. Tatum, the 1972 case holding that a chilling feeling, by itself, is not enough to sue. The strongest plaintiff points to a concrete harm that traces back to the list. The equal protection angle, that leaderboard stacked with the President’s critics, matters more as evidence of motive than as its own lawsuit.
Read it together. The constitutional defect is not the criticism. It is the standing, branded, taxpayer-funded machine that names individuals, recruits the public against them, and pressures the channels that carry their work, while the same administration wields litigation and licensing and access in the background.
THE ETHICS TRAP NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT
Here is the detail that exposes the whole project.
The Society of Professional Journalists, the oldest broad-based press association in the country, sent a formal letter to the White House press secretary demanding the page come down. Its national president and its ethics chair signed it. They pointed to one entry as the tell. CNN’s Jake Tapper had misidentified the race of a suspect on air, then corrected it. Correcting a mistake in the open is what the SPJ Code of Ethics tells journalists to do. The White House put the correction on the offender page anyway.
Sit with that. The government took a reporter who followed the rules, who owned an error in public, and held him up as a villain for it. When a government punishes honesty, it teaches every reporter watching to bury the next mistake instead of fixing it. A page that claims to defend truth ends up rewarding the cover-up.
THE MORAL AND LEADERSHIP FAILURE
Strip away the case law for a moment, because you do not need a law degree to feel what is wrong here.
Leadership is measured by how power treats the people who criticize it. Anyone can protect speech they like. The entire point of the First Amendment is to protect the speech that those in power cannot stand.
A young reporter at a local paper, a freelancer, a commentator with a camera and an opinion, none of them can outspend the federal government, outlast a federal lawsuit, or out-argue a tipline that turns their neighbors into informants. The imbalance is the strategy. The goal is not to win an argument. The goal is to make the next reporter think twice before writing the story.
That is not strength. A confident government answers criticism with facts and lets the public decide. A frightened one builds a list.
THIS IS THE AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK, AND I CAN SHOW YOU THE PAGES
You do not have to take my word that this resembles authoritarian rule. The Society of Professional Journalists said it in writing. In its letter to the White House, the SPJ noted that this page mirrors a 2017 Kremlin initiative that lists independent journalism carrying unfavorable coverage of the Russian government as “fake news,” and warned that the United States should not follow that example. When the oldest press association in America compares your government’s website to a Putin program, that is not partisan noise. That is the alarm.4
Now imagine an outsider with no stake in our politics looking at this page cold. They would not guess they were looking at America. Here is what they would recognize, because they have seen it before.
In China, the Cyberspace Administration runs a state platform to “refute rumors,” an official government site that publishes the government’s version of truth and labels disfavored claims as false. Researchers have criticized it for hiding its methods and tracking the Communist Party’s line. The structure is the same one now sitting on whitehouse.gov.
In Russia, the Kremlin brands journalists and outlets as “foreign agents,” and the media regulator Roskomnadzor went after independent newsrooms like Novaya Gazeta and TV Rain for how they covered the war in Ukraine, then drove them off the air. Russia names the enemy in public first. The shutdown comes later.
In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s allies launched pro-government outlets dressed up as fact-checkers that push the state’s narrative and discredit the press that questions it. In Turkey, a site called “Fact Checking Turkey” treats statements by government officials as the measure of truth and aims its fire at foreign coverage the government dislikes.
In North Korea, the end state of all of this, the government simply owns the truth outright, and no competing account is permitted to exist.
Every one of these regimes begins from the same premise the Media Offenders page begins from: the state decides which journalism is legitimate, and the state keeps a list. We have spent generations telling ourselves that this is what makes us different from them. The page on our own government’s website erases that line.
THE POT, THE KETTLE, AND THE THING THEY WON’T SAY OUT LOUD
Now hold the page up to a mirror, because the irony here is almost too much to take.
This is an administration that has appointed itself the national referee on truth. The same administration whose page calls a doctor “moronic,” brands a reporter “Fake Tapper,” and files its accusations under “Left-Wing Lunacy.” A page built to expose misleading framing is itself a masterclass in misleading framing.
This is a White House that misleads from the podium, recycles claims fact-checkers have already knocked down, and strips context from stories whenever the context is inconvenient. It punished Jake Tapper for correcting himself while pushing out a steady stream of claims it never corrects at all.
That is the pot calling the kettle black, printed on government letterhead and paid for with your money. An administration that misleads the public on a near-daily basis has built a public monument to the supposed lies of everyone else.
THE PART WHERE YOU DECIDE
I am not asking you to agree with any reporter on that list. I am not asking you to like CNN, or the Times, or some influencer you have never heard of. You are allowed to think the press gets plenty wrong. I think they get plenty wrong.
This was never about whether the coverage is good. It is about whether the government of the United States gets to keep a public enemies list of the people who report on it, rank them, and ask your neighbors to turn them in.
So look at the page. Then look at your children.
Is this what you want as America?
Is this really the way you want to raise your kids, in a country where the government keeps a list of who is allowed to speak?
Does the First Amendment still mean anything to you?5
Answer those honestly, then share this with someone who has no idea it is happening. Silence is how his list grows.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
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I want every Democrat in the House and Senate to call a press conference and denounce this tyrannical act against the Constitution of the United States.
Interesting and consistent with the level of depraved behaviour and actions of this corrupt administration.