In a nation where the relationship between power and the press has always been uneasy, a new White House helipad was inaugurated this week before an audience that was largely not there. Major television networks, responding to the Trump administration's removal of CNN from the daily press pool, chose solidarity over access — declining to fill the vacant slot and coordinating a boycott that transformed a minor infrastructure event into a constitutional flashpoint. The question animating the standoff is an old and serious one: whether the freedom of the press can remain meaningful when the execu