Netanyahu's beef with Mamdani

Condemnation of Israel, and Israeli pushback

Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico had their access to the White House restored on Thursday after temporarily being barred from entering despite a federal judge's order demanding that a ban imposed by the Trump administration be lifted. 

Earlier on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered the White House to "immediately return, reinstate, and restore" access to the news outlets for a period of 14 days, saying their lawsuit against the president was likely to succeed in showing that their press passes were revoked without due process.

But hours after the ruling was issued, some reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were still denied access to the White House grounds, and the outlets requested an immediate hearing. 

"This morning journalists from each of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO attempted to enter the White House and were turned away, and Secret Service agents confiscated the hard pass of journalists whose hard passes had not previously been confiscated," the outlets said in a court filing early Thursday. 

Kelly ordered the administration to respond to the accusations of noncompliance by midday Thursday. Within hours, each of the banned news organizations reported that their staffers had been allowed back into the White House. The administration also submitted a filing saying that all confiscated press passes had been returned.

With the reporters' access now restored, Kelly denied the media's request for an emergency hearing. He also gave them until Monday to submit a motion for a preliminary injunction that could block the ban from being enforced while the court considers the underlying legal questions at play in the dispute.

MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images

Trump announced the ban on reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico on Sept. 18, saying the outlets "constantly write or report fiction or lies" about his administration.

The three news organizations filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday, alleging that Trump had violated their First Amendment rights by retaliating against them for coverage he didn't like. 

"President Trump has said in no uncertain terms that he would prefer only to be covered by news organizations and reporters who praise his administration," the complaint stated. "But the Constitution does not allow a president or any other government official to deprive the press of their First Amendment rights and liberty and property interests with no notice or process based solely on his dislike of the content of their reporting." 

The organizations argued that their reporters were not afforded due process and are asking a federal judge to quickly rule that Trump's ban is unconstitutional. The filing cites a 1977 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the White House cannot arbitrarily deny a journalist a press pass without due process.

"This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles," the filing stated.

Dozens of media organizations signed an amicus brief in support of CNN, MS NOW and Politico.

The Trump administration filed a response to the suit on Tuesday, arguing that "access to the White House is a privilege - not a right."

It said that Trump concluded that the three news outlets violated "the standards of professionalism and decorum expected of those given access to the White House Complex, including by trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information." 

Trump had previously indicated that he would appeal any ruling against him.

How the ban unfolded

Graeme Sloan/Getty Images

On Friday afternoon, Trump announced the ban in a Truth Social post, saying it was not prompted by any particular stories but was "a result of their constant 'reporting' FAKE NEWS!"

"It's really just cumulative stories over the last few years. You get sick of it," Trump said at an Oval Office event an hour later while explaining his decision to enact "the ban on the free press."

"There's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories," the president said. "If they want to write them, that's fine, but I don't have to let them into my, into the people's house."

According to CNN, Trump's close aide Natalie Harp showed him clips of media coverage shortly before he announced the ban.

On Saturday, reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were turned away from the White House by members of the Secret Service and had their credentials - so-called hard passes needed for access - confiscated.

The journalists - CNN's Betsy Klein, MS NOW's Akayla Gardner and Politico's Cheyenne Haslett - are listed as plaintiffs in the court filing.

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

The news outlets are longstanding members of the White House press pool that provides rotating coverage of the administration and travels with the president. 

The White House Correspondents' Association condemned the move, saying it violates the First Amendment.

"The American people, through a free and independent press, must be able to scrutinize those elected to power, regardless of whether government officials view it favorably," Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News senior White House correspondent and WHCA president, said in a statement. "That's why courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists, it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting." 

In response to the ban, four major TV networks - ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News - refused to participate in the White House pool, the rotating group of reporters, photographers and videographers that document the president's public events. CNN had been scheduled to serve as the television pool on Monday, including his trip to New York City for the United Nations General Assembly.

As a result, Trump was largely inaudible during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the White House's new helipad on Monday, where he gave a brief speech without the microphone that the pool would typically provide. 

Speaking with reporters after arriving at the United Nations on Tuesday, Trump appeared to take issue with the presence of CNN's Kaitlan Collins, saying he was "surprised" to see the journalist.

"You should not be here covering me," Trump said. "You said you weren't going to be covering me."

In a post on X, Collins said she was credentialed by the United Nations to cover the General Assembly.

CNN is scheduled to serve as the television pool Chinese President President Xi Jinping's visit to the White House on Thursday night.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the ban in an appearance on NBC's Today show earlier Tuesday.

"We're not closing CNN," Rubio said. "There aren't a bunch of police officers or soldiers kicking down the doors of MSNBC or MS NOW, whatever it's called, and arresting people and unplugging it from the grid. They're just not allowed to work from the workspace at the White House."

The president vs. the press

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

U.S. presidents throughout history have complained about negative coverage of their administrations. In 2009, the Obama administration sought to exclude Fox News from a series of interviews with a Treasury Department official in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, but backed down when the other major television networks objected.

During his first term in office, Trump continued the Oval Office's adversarial relationship with the media, referring to the press as "fake news" and the "enemy of the people." It has escalated in his second.

In 2018, Trump administration officials revoked the press pass of then-CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta after they said that he had interrupted the president during a news conference. The network sued, and Kelly, the D.C. federal judge, ordered Acosta's credentials restored.

A similar situation played out the following year when the White House revoked Playboy correspondent Brian Karem's press pass over a verbal argument between Karem and Sebastian Gorka, a former White House aide, at a Rose Garden event. A different federal judge ordered the White House to restore Karem's pass.

Last year, Trump barred Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office, Air Force One and some official events after the news service declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by Trump's preferred name, the Gulf of America. The AP filed suit and the case is ongoing.

In December, the Pentagon announced new restraints on journalists, who were asked to sign a pledge affirming that they would not gather unauthorized information for publication. New organizations refused to sign the pledge, and temporarily lost their credentials. The New York Times filed suit, and in March, a federal judge ruled that the Pentagon restrictions were unconstitutional. The Pentagon restored press credentials to the journalists who refused to sign the pledge, while imposing a new rule that they can only enter the Pentagon with an escort. The Times again filed suit and the case is ongoing.

The White House has also made attempts to circumvent traditional broadcast television models. On Monday night, it launched a YouTube stream branded "TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station" that the White House said would showcase "the Trump Administration's biggest moments all in one place." 

Since its launch, Trump TV has featured a rotating stream of Trump's speeches, Oval Office gatherings and other White House events from throughout the president's second term. 

The first video showed Trump's remarks on July 3 at Mount Rushmore.

In March, the White House launched an official app that is now the No. 2 most popular news app in the App Store. "The American people are not waiting on those cameras," the White House said in a press release touting the app's ranking. "They are going straight to the Presidency."

In his first event without a network TV pool on Monday, Trump unveiled the White House's new helipad before departing for New York. His remarks were nearly inaudible on the White House video feed. Joe Reberkenny, a White House correspondent for the Washington Blade who was serving as the in-town pool reporter, said he couldn't hear Trump "over the sound of the helicopter."This article originally appeared on Yahoo News at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/article/judge-orders-white-house-to-lift-trumps-ban-on-cnn-ms-now-and-politico--but-reporters-say-they-were-still-denied-access-155420637.html

Customer service workers have gotten used to the now-common question coming from the other end of the line: "Wait, are you an AI?" Being mistaken for the technology your employer hopes will replace you has become a regular, if awkward, part of the job. Now, the people who staff call centers are finding themselves in a perhaps stranger position, wondering if it's actually the "customer" that's a robot.Those suspicions are proving to be true. AI agents are increasingly being used to call customer-service lines, sit on hold, and try to negotiate bills or cancel subscriptions, all while the people they're "working" for don't lift a bureaucratic finger. With user-friendlier agents such as Meta's Muse and the upstart Instinct on the market, more consumers are giving AI deployment a go. For them, it may be a useful time-saver and a way of giving corporations a taste of their own medicine - who among us hasn't found ourselves begging a bot to speak with a representative? But there are human agents caught in the crossfire, and they're entering a brave, jarring new world: helping a customer that isn't actually there.AI callers remain a small share of total volume, but they're growing at a fast enough pace that outsourcing firms, banks, insurers, and retailers are bracing themselves. The questions go beyond etiquette. How do you authenticate an AI agent? Should you engage at all? How do you tell whether it's authorized to act on someone's behalf or a scammer? Are you even allowed to ask if it's AI?

One call center agent who works in the claims department of a California-based insurance company tells me she gets a couple of calls from the same AI agent every shift, reaching out on behalf of a firm of accident attorneys. While AI agents generally have a reputation for being extra polite, that's not the case with this one.She is supposed to ask a series of questions to get more details about the incident. Take, say, a car accident claim: Were the airbags deployed? Was the driver working for Uber? Do they have an auto body shop they want to take it to? The law-bot gets progressively irritated when it doesn't have the answers, angrily repeating that it already told her it doesn't know and insisting she wait on hold for an associate who never materializes. "If it's still talking back, we have to stay on until it disconnects," the insurance agent says. It usually takes about five minutes. "It has an attitude. It's funny."What's not so funny is that the AI that her employer uses to grade her "empathy" on calls dings her for not being accommodating enough to the robot. She's often able to get the ratings manually overturned - there's no need to feel the pain an AI agent doesn't have.A second call center agent I spoke to says it's relatively rare for her to wind up on the phone with an AI. She works in the customer retention department at a major credit card company, and says that when a bot does get through, it often seems to be on a fact-finding mission. "I had one just recently where it was like, 'If I had to get to a representative like you, how would I do that?'" she says. "What I think they're trying to do is map out the system."Company policy mandates that she's not allowed to ask the voice on the other line if it's AI - plus she thinks it would be rude - but it's generally quite obvious. They "don't have a lot of voice in their voice, and you can hear there's almost a hesitation when you answer a question that a normal human customer wouldn't have," she says. If the AI is acting on someone's behalf, there's only so much it is allowed to accomplish - for example, only the account holder can close their credit card. "There are certain functions that only the customer can do, so they have to be the one on the line," the agent says.Neither of the bots these women are dealing with appears to be doing anything particularly nefarious. But they hint at why it's going to be a challenge for companies to figure out if the AI caller is a customer, a convenience, or a security risk.

The quality assurance team at TTEC began to detect that something was off about a year and a half ago - some callers just sounded "weird," says James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at the customer service outsourcing company. Once they realized the inbound voices were AI, TTEC asked clients how they wanted to manage them. In general, the response was to take the call - but proceed with caution.

Even if an AI agent isn't a scammer, it might be annoying.

Of course people want a robot to call their internet company about their ever-increasing bill, given how maddening those calls can be.

The credit card agent I spoke to for this story has been at the same company for 30 years. She thinks jobs like hers aren't quite as close to complete AI-ification as people think - the financial industry isn't exactly at the forefront of technology - but she's glad she's close to retirement, given the way things are going. The company already has an automated system that sorts calls and handles basic requests, and the computer could certainly take on more work.She mainly seems bemused by the AI calling her, like it's a wacky new wrinkle to her day-to-day. If it gets through the authentication questions, she has to treat whoever - or whatever - as the customer. And it's better than the human callers who accuse her of being AI, which happens all the time. It often takes a couple of rounds of back-and-forth to convince them, and even then, they're suspicious."There's a level of paranoia," she says. "It's like, if you really want to talk to the robot, I can put him on the line."Maybe we'll all be on the line with robots soon.