White House Press Ban: CNN, Politico, MS NOW and Trump TV
On Monday the president cut the ribbon on a new helipad at the White House, and not one television network carried it live. Nobody banned them from covering it. They chose not to. In this episode, three things. What really happened when three news outlets lost their White House passes. Trump TV, the new around the clock stream straight from the White House. The difference between a free press and a free desk in the West Wing.
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Last Friday, President Trump announced that three news outlets were losing their access to the White House. CNN, MS NOW and Politico. On Saturday morning, reporters from all three showed up at the gate and their press badges were taken from them. The desks CNN and MS NOW use inside the White House sat empty that day.
The reporters turned away included Betsy Klein of CNN, Cheyenne Haslett of Politico and Akayla Gardner of MS NOW. One MS NOW producer was still let onto the grounds, and nobody has explained why.
Those three are the only outlets that lost their passes. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox kept theirs. Every other reporter with a White House badge kept theirs too.
Trump explained the decision in the Oval Office. He said it was not about any one story. It was years of coverage he called one sided and never good, and he said it was wrong to let people keep writing stories that are negative on purpose. He also said he might add more outlets to the list, and he said he expected the whole thing to end up in court.
Vice President JD Vance gave the clearest explanation of what the move is and what it is not. He said Politico will still write its articles. They will still get things wrong about the administration. What changes is that they no longer have an office inside the White House. In his words, it is not a ban. It is refusing to give special access to people doing dishonest reporting.
Vance also put a number on it. He said about ninety two percent of the stories these outlets run on the administration are negative. That number did not come out of nowhere, and conservatives are not the only ones who have measured it.
Trump himself called it a ban on the free press when he talked about it. The outlets jumped on that word, and so did a lot of people online. Words matter, so here is what actually happened. Nobody was told to stop reporting. No story was taken down. No reporter was arrested or fined. Three companies lost a badge that lets their people walk into the White House, sit in the briefing room and work from a desk down the hall from the president. Everything else they do, they can still do.
Monday is when it got strange. CNN was scheduled to be the television pool that day. The pool is a small group of reporters and camera crews who follow the president where space is tight and share what they get with every other outlet. When CNN could not do it, the White House asked the other networks to fill in. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox all said no, standing with CNN.
That meant there was no network camera crew following the president on Monday, the same day he flew to New York for the United Nations and meetings with world leaders. When he spoke at the ribbon cutting for the new helipad, the networks did not carry it live, and viewers watching their coverage could not hear what he said.
The networks are telling the country that a free press is under attack because three of them cannot get into the building. Then all of them, together, chose not to cover the president of the United States for a day. The only people who kept Americans from seeing the president on Monday were the networks.
The White House Correspondents' Association, the group that represents the reporters who cover the White House, called the ban unconstitutional.
On Monday the three outlets sued. The lawsuit is twenty seven pages long and was filed in federal court in Washington. It says the ban violates the First Amendment, and that the White House took their passes without any notice or any process, only because the president does not like what they report. They are asking the judge to throw out the ban and give them their badges back right away.
The case went to Judge Timothy Kelly. He was appointed by Trump. He is also the same judge who handled CNN's lawsuit in twenty eighteen, when the White House pulled the pass of CNN reporter Jim Acosta after a heated press conference. Kelly ordered Acosta's pass given back for the time being, because Acosta had not been given a fair process before it was taken. That case never got a final ruling, because the White House handed the pass back and wrote new rules for reporter behavior.
Kelly has set a hearing for Wednesday afternoon, by video. That is how fast this is moving.
This is not the first time this administration has fought a news outlet over access and won ground. Early in twenty twenty five, the White House blocked the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One after the AP kept calling the Gulf of Mexico by its old name instead of the Gulf of America. When the AP's top editor complained, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles wrote back that the AP's word choice denied the appropriate authority of the duly elected president.
The AP sued. The judge, Trevor McFadden, is another Trump appointee, and in April twenty twenty five he ruled for the AP. He wrote that the court was not giving the AP permanent access to the Oval Office or any special treatment, only a level playing field with the other outlets. Days later, the White House kept AP reporters out of an Oval Office event anyway.
Then a federal appeals court stepped in and let the White House keep the AP out of those small spaces while the case goes on. The vote was two to one. The judge who dissented, an Obama appointee named Cornelia Pillard, said the ruling could not be squared with any sensible understanding of a free press.
The two judges in the majority wrote that those spaces are not open forums for anyone who wants to be there, and that the White House keeps the power to decide which journalists come in, even based on what those journalists say. They made one exception. The AP still had to be let into events in the East Room, where every reporter with a pass is normally invited. The full appeal was argued last November.
That ruling covered small spaces like the Oval Office and the president's plane. This new ban goes further, to the White House grounds and the briefing room. That is where this week's fight will be decided.
A pass to the White House is permission to be inside the home and office of the president. It has always been permission. It was never a promise. When a company spends years telling the country the man who lives there is a liar, a fascist and a danger to democracy, it should not be surprised when he stops handing it the keys.
Now everyone knows.
Welcome Back.
On the same day the networks went dark, the White House turned its own camera on. It is called Trump TV, the Essentials Station. It runs around the clock on the White House website, showing the president's speeches and major remarks, and it went live at seven o'clock Eastern Monday night.
There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay. Anyone with a phone or a computer can pull it up and hear the president in his own words, from start to finish, with nobody cutting it down to a ten second clip or talking over him to explain what he really meant.
Some people are acting like this is the White House trying to replace the news. It is not. CNN is still on the air. So are ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, MS NOW and every newspaper in the country. Trump TV does not stop any of them from doing anything. It is one more place to get information. A viewer can watch the stream, watch the networks, or watch both and decide for themselves.
Nothing in the Constitution or in any law says the news networks get to be the only way the American people hear from their president. They have never had that right. They have only had that habit.
Presidents going around the press is as old as radio. In nineteen thirty three, eight days after he took office, Franklin Roosevelt sat down in front of a radio microphone and talked straight to the country about the banking crisis. He went on to give about thirty of those fireside chats. He did it because many newspaper owners of his day were against him, and radio let him skip them.
John Kennedy held the first press conference carried live on television in nineteen sixty one, so people at home saw his answers without an editor in the middle. Ronald Reagan gave a radio address to the nation nearly every Saturday. Barack Obama put his weekly address on YouTube, started a White House channel, and went on a comedy web show to sell his health care website to young people who were never going to watch the evening news.
Nobody called any of that an attack on the press. It was a president using the tools of his time to reach people directly. Trump TV is the same idea with the tools of this time.
Trump has been doing this longer than most people remember. In the last weeks of his twenty sixteen campaign, his team ran a nightly live show on Facebook from Trump Tower. The campaign said it was a way to reach voters without going through the media. Then came Twitter, and after he was thrown off Twitter, Truth Social, where millions of people read what he says the moment he says it.
People want this. When the networks get to decide which ten seconds of a speech you hear, and which reaction from which guest you hear right after it, you are not hearing the president. You are hearing what the network thinks of the president.
That brings back the number Vance gave, ninety two percent negative. Studies from both sides have found the same pattern for years.
The Media Research Center, a conservative group that tracks news coverage, has measured network evening news coverage of Trump at around ninety percent negative in study after study.
The same pattern showed up at Harvard, which nobody calls a conservative school. Harvard's Shorenstein Center studied news coverage of Trump's first hundred days in office in twenty seventeen. It found eighty percent of the coverage was negative. On CNN and NBC it was ninety three percent negative. Even on Fox it was fifty two percent negative.
So when Vance says more than nine out of every ten stories from these outlets are negative, a Harvard study backs up the same number for CNN.
Negative coverage is one thing. Coverage that turns out to be false is another, and the record on that is long. Some of it ended in court, with real money paid.
In December twenty twenty four, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos. On the air, Stephanopoulos said over and over that Trump had been found liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll case. The jury in that case found Trump liable for sexual abuse, and it specifically did not find that he committed rape. ABC paid fifteen million dollars to Trump's presidential library, another million in legal fees, and put out a statement saying it regretted what was said.
In July twenty twenty five, Paramount, the company that owns CBS, paid sixteen million dollars to settle Trump's lawsuit over a Sixty Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Harris was asked the same question about Israel on two CBS programs. Face the Nation aired one answer. Sixty Minutes aired a different, cleaner answer that made her sound more sure of herself than she did in the full interview.
For fairness, Paramount did not admit doing anything wrong and did not apologize. Its critics say the company settled because it needed the government to sign off on a merger at the time. Even so, the executive producer of Sixty Minutes quit a few months before the settlement, saying he had lost his independence, and the president of CBS News left soon after.
Put those two together. ABC and CBS paid a combined thirty one million dollars over how they handled stories about Trump and Harris. Those are two of the same networks that refused on Monday to cover the president, in solidarity with CNN.
The worst example comes from overseas. In October twenty twenty four, one week before the election, the BBC aired a Panorama documentary on Trump. It took two parts of his January sixth speech that were almost an hour apart and cut them together, so it sounded like he told the crowd he would walk to the Capitol with them and fight like hell. He never said those words in that order.
The BBC later admitted the edit gave the mistaken impression that Trump had made a direct call for violent action. It apologized. The head of the BBC resigned over it. The BBC still refused to pay, so Trump sued in federal court in Florida for up to ten billion dollars. The trial is set for February of next year, and the judge has already refused the BBC's request to hold off on turning over its internal documents.
The three outlets that lost their passes have their own record.
In June twenty seventeen, CNN published a story tying Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund under investigation. Within days, CNN pulled the story down and apologized, and the three journalists behind it resigned.
In December of that same year, CNN reported that Donald Trump Junior got an email offering him access to hacked WikiLeaks documents before those documents were public. The date on the email turned out to be ten days later than CNN reported, after the documents were already out for anyone to see. The story fell apart, and CNN corrected it.
In January twenty nineteen, CNN and others portrayed Nick Sandmann, a high school student from Covington Catholic in Kentucky, as the one who started a confrontation with a Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial. Longer video showed a very different picture. Sandmann sued. CNN settled with him a year later. NBC, which owns what is now MS NOW, settled with him too.
In January twenty twenty five, a jury in Florida found that CNN had defamed a Navy veteran named Zachary Young. CNN had suggested on the air that he was running a black market, cashing in on desperate Afghans trying to escape the Taliban. The jury found the network liable, and CNN settled with him before the jury could decide on extra damages meant to punish the network.
MS NOW went by the name MSNBC until last year. In August twenty nineteen, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell reported, based on one source he did not name, that Russian billionaires had co signed Trump's bank loans. He retracted it on the air the next night and admitted the story had not gone through the network's normal checks before he said it.
Politico has its entry too. In October twenty twenty, three weeks before the election, Politico ran a headline saying the Hunter Biden laptop story had the classic marks of a Russian disinformation operation. The headline came from a letter signed by fifty one former intelligence officials. The New York Times and The Washington Post later confirmed that emails on the laptop were real.
None of this means every story these outlets run is false. It means that when the White House says some of their reporting is dishonest, there is a record to point to, with dates, corrections, apologies and settlement checks attached.
A president is not above criticism. Nobody should want coverage that is all positive either. That would be propaganda. What no president owes anyone is a front row seat, handed over for free, to a company that has already decided every story before it is written.
The networks built their business on being the gatekeepers. For seventy years, if a president wanted to reach the country, he had to go through three or four television networks and a handful of big newspapers. That world is gone. Trump TV, Truth Social, podcasts and the internet mean the gate is open, and the people who used to stand at it do not like that.
The networks can keep covering the president however they want. The White House can put the president on camera itself. The viewer picks. That is not less freedom. It is more.
Now everyone knows.
Welcome Back.
The First Amendment is forty five words long. The part about the press says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. That is it. It says the government cannot stop you from printing, publishing or broadcasting what you want to say.
It does not promise the press a desk in the White House, a seat on Air Force One or a chair in the briefing room. None of that is in the Constitution, because none of that existed when it was written.
The briefing room itself is a lot newer than people think. It was built in nineteen seventy under Richard Nixon, on top of an indoor swimming pool that Franklin Roosevelt had used. Before that, reporters waited in a lobby. The briefing room has forty nine seats. Thousands of journalists in this country will never sit in one of them.
Air Force One has a small press section at the back of the plane with about a dozen seats. For decades, a reporters' group decided who got them. Last year the White House took over choosing who goes in the press pool, and it began adding podcasters and newer outlets to the mix. It also set aside a new seat in the briefing room for independent journalists, podcasters and online creators, people who had never been let in before. The plane belongs to the government, and the president decides who flies on it.
Every one of those seats is limited. Somebody gets in and somebody does not. That has always been true. For years, the people deciding were the big outlets themselves, and they tended to pick each other. Now the White House decides, and the same outlets say it is a crisis.
When the appeals court ruled for the White House in the AP case, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put it this way. She said the AP is not guaranteed special access to cover the president in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in other sensitive places, and that thousands of other journalists have never been given that chance at all. That is the whole argument in two sentences.
There is proof that losing a badge does not stop reporting. In October of twenty twenty five, the Pentagon put out new rules for reporters who work inside the building. The rules asked reporters to agree they would not go after information the Pentagon had not approved for release, even information that was not classified, or they could lose their badges. Most of the major outlets, Fox included, refused to sign and turned in their Pentagon badges. The only major outlet reported to have signed was One America News. They walked out. Every one of them kept reporting on the military the very next day, from outside the building. The stories kept coming. That is what a free press looks like without a pass.
The outlets in this lawsuit do have an argument, and it is worth hearing plainly. It is mostly about process, not about the right to a desk. In nineteen seventy seven, a federal appeals court ruled in a case called Sherrill versus Knight. A reporter had been turned down for a White House pass by the Secret Service with no explanation. The court said that once the White House hands out passes to reporters, it cannot turn one down without giving a reason, a notice, and a chance to answer.
In twenty twenty, the same appeals court sided with a reporter named Brian Karem, whose pass was suspended after a shouting match in the Rose Garden. The court said the rules he was punished under were too vague for him to know he was breaking them. Those are the cases CNN, MS NOW and Politico are leaning on now.
So the fight in court may come down to whether the White House followed the right steps, not whether these outlets have a right to be there. The White House can answer that by writing clear rules and following them. What the cases do not say, and what no court has said, is that the Constitution guarantees any company a permanent office inside the president's house.
The last president did not have clean hands on this either.
In the fall of two thousand nine, President Obama's top aides said Fox News was not really a news organization and called it the communications arm of the Republican Party. The Treasury Department then tried to keep Fox out of a round of pool interviews with the administration's pay czar. The other networks refused to do the interviews without Fox, and the Treasury backed down. The networks stood up for a rival then, the same way they stood up for CNN on Monday.
In twenty thirteen it came out that Obama's Justice Department had secretly collected two months of phone records from more than twenty phone lines used by AP reporters and editors. It also came out that the department had called Fox News reporter James Rosen a possible co conspirator in a leak case, in court papers used to get a warrant for his emails, just for reporting on what a government source told him.
That was a real threat to a free press, because it went after how reporters find out what is going on and who talks to them. It put sources in danger of prison. Taking back a badge that lets someone into a building does not come anywhere close to reading a reporter's phone records.
The people crying the loudest about all this deserve an answer.
All weekend, the same message went out from cable hosts, reporters and a lot of angry people online. Trump is killing the free press. This is how democracy dies. This is what dictators do. The country is one step from becoming a place where you cannot criticize the government.
The people saying it are saying it on television, on the same networks they say are being silenced. They are saying it in newspapers and on websites that are still up and running. They are saying it in a lawsuit filed in open court, in front of a judge Trump appointed, who has ruled against Trump before. Nobody is arresting them. Nobody is shutting them down. Nobody is even asking them to stop.
A country that silences its critics does not let CNN criticize the government all day, every day, on national television. It does not let a news company sue the president in federal court. It does not let the other networks refuse to cover the president for a day to make a point. Every one of those things happened this week, which is proof that the press is as free as it has ever been.
The people calling this a crackdown cannot tell the difference between a right and a favor. The right is being able to print and say what you want without the government stopping you. That right is untouched. The favor is a badge, a desk and a seat on the plane. The White House gave that favor, and the White House took it back.
They also cannot seem to tell the difference between being criticized and being silenced. The president criticized these outlets. He said their coverage is dishonest. That is not censorship. That is a public official answering the people who attack him every day, which is his right too. The free press does not mean the press gets to talk and everyone else has to stay quiet about it.
If CNN, MS NOW and Politico want to cover the White House, they still can. They can watch the briefings online like everyone else. They can call sources. They can file records requests. They can stand outside the gate. They can watch Trump TV. Most of what gets reported about the White House already comes from people who never set foot inside it.
When the grown ups in the newsroom are done complaining, they might ask themselves why the public is not rushing to their defense. Gallup has asked Americans the same question for decades, whether they trust the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. In nineteen seventy two, sixty eight percent said yes. Last year it was twenty eight percent, the lowest Gallup has ever recorded. Among Republicans it was eight percent. The news business is now the least trusted institution Gallup measures, below Congress.
Settlements, retractions and edited videos are a big part of why. People can see for themselves when the coverage is decided before the facts are in.
Nobody lost the right to report. Three companies lost a desk after years of coverage that was overwhelmingly negative and, more than once, flat wrong. The networks chose to go dark for a day. The White House opened its own channel so people can hear the president for themselves. A judge hears the first round on Wednesday.
The free press is doing just fine. What ended this week is the idea that a handful of news companies get to own the only door to the White House. That door was never theirs.
Now everyone knows.
AND THAT'S IT.
That is everyone knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I am Brian Bullock of starborn studios. Find me on X at Everyoneknows1. If this hits you share it with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe. leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com
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