Fox News’s bond with President Trump is undeniable. Prime time stars like Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters cheerlead his policies, the president’s daughter-in-law hosts a weekly show on the network, and Fox’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, attended Mr. Trump’s nominating convention in 2024.
Nonetheless, this week Fox News has joined other networks in standing up for the rival media outlets that Mr. Trump decried as “fake” and banned from the White House — and two senior Fox journalists emerged as lead actors in the White House press corps’s standoff with the administration.
At a glance, it’s an unlikely position for Fox News, wrought in part by history and in part by sheer coincidence. And it’s confused some liberal Fox critics and caused some heartburn for Trump hard-liners.
So first, some facts.
Fox News is one of the five major networks — the others are ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC — that form the presidential TV pool, sharing the duties and costs of generating video footage of Mr. Trump’s everyday activities. When the president barred CNN, along with Politico and MS NOW, from the White House last week, the networks rebelled, refusing to film his daily public events until CNN was reinstated.
Fox News did not hesitate to go along with the plan. On Tuesday night, for instance, Fox was the scheduled pool crew for Mr. Trump’s Air Force One arrival at Joint Base Andrews, but it declined to film the event.
A Fox News spokeswoman referred an inquiry on Wednesday to a joint statement from the five networks, which Fox co-signed: “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
Inside Fox News this week, journalists have kept an eye on the past and the future, according to people with knowledge of its internal deliberations.
It was a big deal when Fox News joined the White House TV pool in the 1990s, back when the fledgling channel was seeking legitimacy in Washington. And in 2009, the pool came to Fox’s defense. When the Obama administration called the network “a wing of the Republican Party” and moved to bar it from a Treasury Department event, the other networks refused to participate until the Obama team relented and reinstated Fox.
The network is also aware that, theoretically, a future Democratic administration could try to ban Fox News the way Mr. Trump has barred CNN, the people said. So standing up for CNN now may benefit Fox later. That sentiment has been echoed by conservatives like Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary to former President George W. Bush. “Don’t ban them,” Mr. Fleischer wrote on X. “Or one day they’ll ban us.”
Fox News has also supported the journalists who were effectively evicted from the Pentagon in March by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in March as part of a series of moves aimed at drastically curtailing reporters’ access to the Defense Department. Mr. Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host, has not appeared on Fox News in more than a year, even as other networks, like CBS, have repeatedly booked him. (The New York Times has sued over the Pentagon restrictions.)
It so happens that the current chair of the five-network pool group — a role that rotates every quarter — is Bryan Boughton, Fox News’s Washington bureau chief. So Mr. Boughton was the signatory on a note on Monday decreeing that “effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president.”
It also happens that the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association is Jacqui Heinrich, an anchor and senior correspondent at Fox News. So Ms. Heinrich is the name and face behind many public statements condemning Mr. Trump’s aggression toward the media and demanding his administration respect the rights of the free press.
Not every Fox viewer is pleased, with some right-wing accounts on social media blasting the network for its actions.
But Fox is not alone among conservative-friendly networks in standing up for the White House press corps. The right-wing channel Newsmax is opposed to Mr. Trump’s press ban, according to its chief executive, Christopher Ruddy.
“We hope the president reconsiders his decision, as this would set a bad precedent for all media, including conservative outlets like Newsmax,” Mr. Ruddy said in an interview. “Newsmax asked tough questions during both the Obama and Biden administrations, and at no point did anyone suggest that we might be banned.”
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