In the increasingly bitter legal stand-off between US President Donald Trump and media outlets whose reporting he dislikes, a new and crucial third party has emerged: citizens who watch and read the news and need it to do their jobs.
A lawsuit filed on Monday on behalf of six such citizens – effectively representing the audiences for the news media – argues that it is not only the rights of news organisations that are violated when Trump bans them from White House premises.
Even more fundamentally, the lawsuit argues, such bans violate the public’s right to independent reporting about its president and government.