On the eve of President Trump's address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat across from him in the White House and raised a question that democracies have long wrestled with: who controls the space between power and the public that watches it. The meeting, ostensibly about the concerns of the nation's largest city, became something larger — a moment in which an elected official chose not to let the constraints of protocol silence a matter of principle. Press freedom, and what its erosion signals about a government's relationship to accountability, now