The major US television networks are set to resume their joint coverage of President Donald Trump on Sunday, even though the White House has barred CNN from the TV pool, The New York Times reported, citing four people briefed on the discussions. Five networks, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC, share the job of filming the president's daily events on a rotating basis and distribute the footage to one another and to news outlets around the world. For the past week, they had suspended the pool to pressure the administration into reinstating CNN after Trump banned its journalists from the White House grounds, going as far as refusing to air footage of parts of Trump's summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Under a tentative plan that began to take shape late on Friday, the other four networks will return to pool duties, according to the New York Times. Whenever CNN's turn comes up in the rotation, the networks will decide whether to send a substitute crew. If they do not, the slot will stay empty and Trump will go without major network coverage. The networks could agree to suspend the pool again at any time, the newspaper reported. They declined to comment on Saturday. In an earlier joint statement, they said "no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting".
A shifting standoff
On Friday, the administration allowed CNN to provide pool footage of Trump and Xi's visit to the National Archives, and CBS supplied a pool camera for Xi's arrival at the White House that morning. Later that day, however, the White House reversed course and told CNN it could not act as the pool for Trump's trip to Tennessee on Saturday. The pool went dark again after the other networks declined to provide a replacement. According to the New York Times, network leaders said in private discussions that Trump's renewed exclusion of CNN had left them with a choice between several unpalatable options. If the pool were suspended indefinitely and a crisis broke out, there would be no cameras to film the president. Resuming coverage, meanwhile, effectively gives Trump more control over which outlets get close access to many of his events, while ensuring viewers still receive high-quality broadcast coverage.
Network leaders described the new arrangement as ad hoc. If the White House was deciding at the last minute which outlets could attend certain events, they said, the pool would do the same.
The legal battle
The standoff began on 18 September, when Trump abruptly banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, saying he disliked their coverage. On Thursday, Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the US District Court in Washington ordered the White House to reinstate the outlets for two weeks, making clear that CNN journalists should get back their hard passes, the badges that give access to the White House grounds. The ruling gave no explicit instruction, however, on whether CNN must be readmitted to the smaller TV pool, which covers the president in tighter spaces such as the Oval Office and Air Force One. No date has yet been set for the next hearing.
The dispute could take months to resolve in the courts, the New York Times noted. A case involving The Associated Press, which the administration barred from the White House press pool in 2025, has dragged on for more than a year. A federal court quickly restored the agency's access, but an appeals court largely reversed that decision. Network leaders believe it would be untenable to suspend TV coverage of Trump for any significant length of time, according to two people briefed on their discussions.
For now, Trump shows no sign of backing down. In a social media post on Saturday, he wrote that "Fake News should not be allowed in the White House".
Source: The New York Times
