Five Rival Networks Pulled the Plug on Trump's Pool Camera Together. Now DOJ Wants to Know if That Was an Illegal Boycott.

President Trump holds a press conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on June 27, 2025, with television cameras lined up along the back of the room. Official White House Photo by Molly Riley via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The announcement came from a Fox News executive. When President Trump barred CNN from the White House grounds last month, the television pool chair at the time, Fox's Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, wrote that with the president “preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties,” there would be “no replacement pool put in place,” CNN reported.

No pooled TV coverage of the president followed for several days. Now the Justice Department wants to know whether the five networks behind that pool, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC, broke federal antitrust law by acting together. The department sent “civil investigative demands” to the networks on Friday, a Justice Department official told NBC News, and officials are seeking records of the networks' communications with one another about the pool, according to people familiar with the matter cited by The Wall Street Journal.

“Members of the television press pool have boycotted covering White House events. Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” department spokeswoman Emily Covington said Saturday. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.”

An investigation is not a finding. No case has been filed, and the department has not said what evidence it has or what it expects to find.

Competitors who pick up the phone to each other

The pool is a cost-sharing deal among rivals. The five networks take turns filming the president's appearances and travel and hand the footage to one another and to the wider press corps, a year-round job in which a multi-day trip can cost tens of thousands of dollars, CNN reported. Subscribers to that feed include Newsmax, One America News Network and C-SPAN, NBC News noted, along with local stations across the country.

That is the part conservatives should not wave away. For years, viewers on the right have complained that the big legacy networks move as a pack, with the same framing, the same omissions and the same targets. Last month they literally moved as one: the networks issued a rare joint statement saying “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” and the shared camera stayed off until a federal judge ordered the banned outlets back in. Individual networks, NBC among them, kept covering open White House events on their own during the halt, NBC said. But the pooled feed that smaller outlets rely on had nothing to distribute, because the five companies that run it decided together not to fill CNN's slot.

Whether that is an antitrust problem is a different question from whether it was a coordinated decision. On the second question, Fox's own pool email answers it.

The lawyers who say this case can't stick

Jonathan Kanter, who ran the Antitrust Division under President Biden, told CNN that the theory runs straight into Supreme Court precedent that protected civil rights-era boycotts as speech. “This is not even in the same zip code of an antitrust violation,” he said. “It's literally freedom of speech.” He added: “It's no more an antitrust violation than the reporters coming together to form the pool in the first place.” Kanter served the last administration, and readers can weigh that.

The objections are not limited to journalism groups. Nico Perrino, an executive vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, invoked the president's inauguration-day promise to restore free speech. “Is there a lever this administration is unwilling to pull to punish its enemies?” he wrote on X, CNN reported. “So much for ‘bringing free speech back to America’ and ending the lawfare.”

Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the probe “another and even more brazen attempt to try to intimidate journalists,” according to NBC. Jose Zamora of the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote that “the government should not use antitrust investigations to intimidate news outlets defending press access,” the AP reported.

Defending the ban in court, asking for the emails on the side

Here is where a government-skeptic should slow down. The Justice Department is not a neutral referee in this fight. It is defending the president's ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico in federal court right now, CNN reported, and a judge's order keeping the three outlets on the grounds runs through Tuesday, Oct. 13. The Hoosier Enquirer covered the last extension of that order.

At the same time, another arm of the same department is demanding the networks' internal communications about the pool, including its formation and its recent operations, according to two sources quoted by CNN. One of those sources said the probe may factor into the lawsuit itself. Brown argued, in comments reported by CNN, that the investigation “appears to be a pretext for seeking records from the networks about how they are covering daily White House events during a media ban the president himself put in place.”

There is also the question of where the idea came from. The inquiry surfaced two weeks after Trump ally Laura Loomer publicly urged the department to go after the networks on antitrust grounds, CNN reported. That does not prove the Antitrust Division took its cue from her. It does mean the department should be ready to show its work.

Picture the same move from a Democratic administration. A White House bars Fox News from the grounds, the other networks refuse to replace Fox in the pool, and the Justice Department responds by demanding every network's emails about the decision while it defends the ban in court. Conservatives would call that a weaponized DOJ, and they would be right to. The test for a principle is whether it still holds when your side has the power.

What the networks and the White House are saying

Not much yet. Representatives for NBC, CBS and CNN declined to comment to NBC News, and Fox did not immediately respond. ABC News said it had not received any notification from the department but expected to. The White House did not immediately respond to NBC's request for comment. The networks either declined to comment or did not respond to CNN on Saturday night, and the BBC reported that the networks had not yet commented.

The fight started Sept. 19, when the White House blocked reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW from entering the building and revoked their credentials, calling coverage of the president a “privilege – not a right,” the Guardian reported. Trump cited what he called “their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” This White House has also taken control of who sits in the pool away from the White House Correspondents' Association and is still fighting the AP in court over access, the BBC noted. Pool coverage has since resumed, CNBC reported, and NBC's Washington bureau chief, Chloe Arensberg, now chairs the TV pool, according to CNN.

So two calendars are running. On Tuesday a judge decides whether three outlets keep their access. The antitrust demand has no such date attached. Both things can be true at once: five competing networks did act as a bloc, and the government those networks cover is the last institution that should get to decide, with document demands in hand, whether that bloc was lawful.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.