President Donald Trump flew to Chicago on Sunday morning to attend the Presidents Cup golf tournament in a Chicago suburb. Despite the tension between Trump and the media outlets he’s trying to ban, which include CNN, a network camera crew is once again filming his public events on Sunday.
Why? It’s complicated.
The White House TV pool is a five-network rotation of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC. The news organizations take turns filming the president’s activities — rotating in alphabetical order by network name — and distributing that footage to the other members. From there, the five networks distribute footage to their local station affiliates and paying subscribers.
It’s a cost-sharing system for America’s largest television networks, but it’s also one grounded in principle: There should always be independent eyes watching the president of the United States.
But the state of the TV pool has been in turmoil since Trump announced on Sept. 18 that he was banning CNN — along with MS NOW and Politico — from the White House grounds. On Sept. 21, the five-network pool said it would halt TV coverage of presidential events because of the White House’s ban of CNN.
The three outlets sued the same day and on Thursday morning won a 14-day reprieve from a federal judge to access the White House grounds. But at the time of the ruling, which did not make stipulations about the TV pool, it was still an open question whether the White House would allow CNN to serve as the TV pooler when its turn came up in the rotation.
On Thursday, following the court order, representatives of the five networks decided to restart the pool for Friday. CBS was in line to be the primary TV pooler for an important day of coverage — Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping — and the White House had credentialed CNN to film and disseminate footage for an event at the National Archives featuring the two world leaders.
But when CNN was slated for primary TV pool duty on Saturday, the White House blocked the outlet from traveling on Air Force One to Knoxville, Tennessee, a decision first reported by The Washington Post.
The five networks then agreed not replace CNN with another network, so there were no pool cameras following Trump on Saturday during his trip to a college football game. On Sunday, the TV pool rotation picked up where it left off, with Fox News pooling for the president’s trip to Illinois.
On Sunday, Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the decision to keep CNN off Air Force One in an interview with ABC News. “The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane, and it is national security, especially on Air Force One, and especially at the White House. And so, it’s not just — it’s not just the fact that they refuse to report anything accurately.”
The networks in recent days voted that when CNN’s turn to pool comes up, they will either vote to fill the spot or skip the network’s turn with no pool coverage for that day, depending on the newsworthiness of the day’s events, according to two people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.
The networks are trying to balance the need to cover important news about the president with expressing solidarity for CNN, the people said, adding that there is also a concern that the major networks do not want to cede independent coverage of the president to the White House or sympathetic handpicked networks.
Some of these details were first reported by the New York Times.
There’s another complicating factor at play: CNN and CBS are set to be owned by one common company when the merger deal between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. closes, which could happen in the coming weeks. That adds to the uncertainty about the future balance of the five-network pool.
In a statement to The Post, the White House called Trump the “most accessible” president in U.S. history:
“But if a reporter walks into an interview with their headline and narrative already decided, why do they need to be in the room?” the White House wrote. “They can write their garbage from anywhere. Even after outlets were given access to the White House, they declined to cover various events proving this isn’t about access. It’s performative and dishonest.”
Violet Jira contributed to this report.
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