And you saw what the president said about the First Amendment. It doesn't say that you can't be in the White House. But there is precedent as far as legal action that has opened that up.

JONATHAN TURLEY: There is. One of the most influential cases is called Sherrill from 1977 in the D.C. Circuit. And they emphasize that you cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination, that once you allow media in, you can't deny that access arbitrarily.

The White House seems to be ready to challenge Sherrill, which would require them to go all the way to the Supreme Court. That's a considerable risk. You know, this is a president that gained a lot of ground for his successor presidents. In cases like Trump v. Slaughter, it was a huge win for presidential power. He could be giving back some territory with this one.

You know, these courts have emphasized, even the ones that favored the White House, that it can't be done arbitrarily. You can't engage in viewpoint discrimination. Here, that seems to be the case in spades. You have the president saying, I don't like this coverage. Now, he calls it fake news. But presidents have never been entirely right with the media.

George Washington referred to the media as those infamous scribblers. Thomas Jefferson said you can't believe anything if it's in a newspaper. So this is not the first aggrieved president. But this runs against the grain of our traditions, our values, and, frankly, the First Amendment. He may be creating new law here, but it may not be the law he wants to create.

BAIER: Yeah, and I've written about a lot of presidents, and all of them have had their problems with the press. Brit, the action about the network pool and kind of pulling the camera on the producer, it is, you know, something that the president has used effectively. He has talked to the pool in the Oval Office many, many times a day sometimes. And, you know, we will see him on non-pool events like the U.N. speech. But it is this solidarity standing with the pool that the TV networks are adhering to.

HUME: Yeah, that will be a loss for all of us who've tried to cover him through the years. It will also be a loss for the president, as you suggest, Bret. He has been uncommonly accessible to media.

He talks to the press all the time. A lot of it is to the pool. The reason the pool exists, by the way, is because the White House is not a spacious place, and you can't accommodate everybody who wants to cover a pool event with cameras and sound.

So you have this pool, which is just an individual network which gathers and distributes this information. And not every organization wants to cover the White House that has the facilities to do it, which is why there are only five in the pool that are big enough to do it. But shutting himself off in that way from the pool, which is what he now has effectively done, I think is a loss, as I say, for us. And he'll miss it because he loves to talk to the press.