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Mignon Clyburn, the lone Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, joined with activists on Capitol Hill to commemorate the anniversary of the agency's landmark network neutrality rules and vowed to fight to defend them. “Now it is time for us to once again roll up our sleeves and fight for the protections embodied in the Open Internet Order, that are designed to ensure that the internet remains an open platform, that enables free speech, freedom of expression and the ability for innovation to flourish,” said Commissioner Clyburn, speaking alongside representatives from civil rights groups and advocates of net neutrality. “For me it can be summed up in this way: How do we ensure that one of most inclusive, enabling, empowering platforms of our time continues to be one where our applications, products, ideas and diverse points of view have the exact same chance of being seen and heard by everyone, regardless of our class, race, economic status or where we live?” Clyburn added.

President Donald Trump lashed out at The New York Times in an interview with Breitbart News, saying that he can handle rough treatment from the media but that the nation’s largest newspaper is out to sink him at any cost. “It’s intent. It’s also intent. If you read The New York Times, if you read The New York Times, it’s — the intent is so evil and so bad,” Trump told Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, in a sit-down interview in the Oval Office. “The stories are wrong in many cases, but it’s the overall intent.”

Democratic governors and some Republican governors who attended a meeting with President Donald Trump on Nov 27 were excluded from the traditional bipartisan press conference outside the West Wing. The nation's governors, in town for an annual conference that by tradition includes an audience with the president, visited the White House the morning of Nov 27. President Trump told governors his administration would streamline regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act and increase spending on defense and infrastructure. After the event, Republican governors, including Gov Matt Bevin (R-KY) and Mary Fallin (R-OK), met reporters outside the White House. No Democrats were present.

Jared Leopold, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association, said that Democratic governors who tried to meet reporters at the "Pebble Beach" media area outside the White House were sent elsewhere. "Some of our gov's planned to go to Pebble Beach to talk to reporters and were not able to," Leopold said.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, says journalists covering President Trump should not spin "out of control.” "The danger is that [journalists] spin ourselves out of control out of anxiety or fear or whatever you want to call it," Goldberg said. "But all that this moment requires is a doubling down of our basic commitment to a fact-based discourse."

The comments came before the White House barred several news outlets from a question-and-answer briefing with press secretary Sean Spicer on Feb 24. "We're not supposed to be the resistance. We're not supposed to be the opposition," said Goldberg. "We're supposed to tell the truth about what's happening in any given moment and in any given place. And let's just do that."

The Washington Post pushed back against President Donald Trump’s claims that a report about former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with a Russian ambassador was “fake news.” President Trump obliquely referred to the Post's story on Flynn that cited nine former or current officials, insisting the sources were made up. “Everything we published regarding Gen. Flynn was true, as confirmed by subsequent events and on-the-record statements from administration officials themselves,” Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a statement. "The story led directly to the general’s dismissal as national security adviser. Calling press reports fake doesn’t make them so.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says the Department of Justice must probe reports that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked the FBI to push back on media coverage linking figures from President Trump's campaign to Russian intelligence. Reports emerged Feb 23 the FBI rejected a White House request to dismiss news stories about staffers from Trump’s campaign repeatedly contacting Russian intelligence agents.

“The Trump White House has been caught trying to pressure the FBI into undermining a vital national security investigation into explosive ties between senior Trump officials and Russian intelligence agents, an action which is in violation of Department of Justice rules and may be illegal,” Minority Leader Pelosi said. “White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has committed an outrageous breach of the FBI’s independence,” Pelosi added. "Priebus has not only damaged his reputation but tainted the impartiality of the FBI.” “The Department of Justice’s Inspector General must open a new investigation into any and all conversations Priebus and other White House officials held with the FBI on ongoing investigations. The American people deserve to know the truth.”

President Donald Trump’s top spokesman dismissed a news report alleging the FBI rejected a request by the White House to publicly knock down reports about communications between Trump associates and the Russians. “What you guys have done is indefensible and inaccurate,” he told reporters.

Senior administration officials accused CNN, which broke the story, of mischaracterizing the White House’s request to the FBI — though they did not dispute that a communication took place between the FBI and White House officials. CNN reported that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus reached out to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe asking them to talk to reporters on background to dispute the stories about communications between Trump associates and Russia, which ran in The New York Times and CNN. Comey reportedly rejected the request because the alleged communications are the subject of an investigation. The discussions between the FBI and the White House could run aground of longstanding rules restrictions of contact regarding pending investigations.

The White House is barring counselor Kellyanne Conway from television appearances after the high-profile aide made multiple on-air statements contradicting the Trump administration’s official stance.

Conway, who was recently a regular fixture on TV news, hasn’t appeared for an on-air interview since early last week. That Feb 13, she argued that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had the “full confidence” of President Trump. Flynn resigned from his post later that day amid revelations that he misled Vice President Pence about the nature of his conversations with the Russian ambassador. And on Feb 21, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump asked for Flynn’s resignation. That directly contradicted Conway’s claim on NBC’s “Today” earlier that morning that Flynn had offered to step down. Conway was "off message," a White House source told CNN. Since then, Conway has sat for interviews on radio shows, but has been uncharacteristically absent from the television news circuit.

The Washington Post has a new slogan on its homepage: "Democracy Dies in Darkness." Post spokesperson Kris Coratti told CNN that readers should expect to see more of it on other platforms of the publication. "We thought it would be a good, concise value statement that conveys who we are to the many millions of readers who have come to us for the first time over the last year," Coratti said.

Technology advocacy groups and trade associations representing companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft criticized a suggestion from the head of the Department of Homeland Security that foreign nationals should provide social media passwords to enter the US. “This proposal would enable border officials to invade people’s privacy by examining years of private emails, texts, and messages,” the groups wrote in a letter. "It would expose travelers and everyone in their social networks, including potentially millions of US citizens, to excessive, unjustified scrutiny.”

The letter rejecting collecting non-citizen’s social media passwords was prompted by Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly’s comments during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing. The letter’s signatories included trade groups such as the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and the Internet Association. Google, Facebook and Amazon belong to both groups. Other signatories included the American Library Association, Internews and Access Now.