(Washington, DC) – President-Extant Donald Trump has established a policy barring independent bloggers from attending press briefings; even the briefings that don’t matter. This practice is is causing the blogger community at large to worry about whether the “fifth estate,” meaning the free, unshackled, independent journalists of America, is being threatened.

Freedom of the press, guaranteed by the first amendment to the United States Constitution and made irrelevant by the decline of the local newspaper, has been a hallmark of our country’s culture since before the Revolution. Our country would likely not exist in its present form if it were not for publishers, authors, and journalists such as Benjamin Harris, John Campbell, James and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Anne Catherine Hoof Green, Jonas Green, and many others. All of these citizens were truly independent of government interference, often writing anonymously, printing their own materials through sweat and long hours of hard work, circulating their own publications through armies of child laborers, and plagiarizing each other’s works in their own publications in order to spread important ideas far and wide.

Included in the United Nations’ declaration of human rights, is the statement: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.” In Ancient Rome, this idea was expressed through the generally acceptable act of writing of messages on the walls of buildings, so that they could be read by passersby, and used to send messages to loved ones. 

Today, the forwarding of new, unique, important ideas is accomplished mainly by bloggers, authors of fan fiction, Facebook and Twitter journalists, and webpage comment section trolls. Without these many journalists, America would be many less than it is today. American journalist A. J. Liebling famously once said that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Today, everyone with access to the Internet effectively has a printing press; what they lack is an army of underage laborers to circulate their work.

In the spirit of the United State constitution, the United Nations’ declaration of human rights, and the ancient and classic practice of writing on walls, bloggers have asked for admittance into the White House Press Briefing Room in order to gain access to the halls of power for the purpose of holding the President-Extant accountable, and drawing significant and lasting graffiti on the walls of the White House. 

One solution offered by former Presidential Candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is to hold future press conferences in the nearby Kennedy Center. Not only would this allow for a much larger number of attendees, but they would have a great view of the Potomac River and Theodore Roosevelt Island, and it is adjacent to the Watergate complex. Sanders explained, “Being so close to the Watergate complex will remind the journalists of their responsibility toward the nation, and also remind the President-Extant about what happens to those who get on the wrong side of the press.”