Trump didn’t break the press. They did that to themselves

Last week, Fox News seemed to be trying to give Donald Trump what he wanted. Network personalities went on air and recited, with all the enthusiasm of a sixth grader reading a book report he skimmed on the bus, the rosiest possible version of Trump’s economy. Will Cain stood in front of a big board and tried to force-feed viewers praise for an economy that much of the public sees as failing them and their families. Greg Gutfeld, in the familiar performance of a man discovering empathy only when the numbers flatter his side, acted surprised to care about falling poverty statistics. It all had the feel of a network reading from the same set of talking points, dispatched from somewhere on the C-suite level, hurrying to convince viewers that Trump’s economy is thriving.

But that synchronized propaganda blitz flopped. 

Whatever the assignment was supposed to accomplish, it did not appease the man it was designed to flatter. By the end of the week, the president who had just been handed hours of favorable spin by the most watched cable network in the nation let out a tantrum so large it swallowed three unrelated newsrooms. Facing a failing presidency, crashing poll numbers, the prospect of a Democratic wave in November’s midterms and zero sense of a second-term agenda, Trump just up and banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House for seemingly no reason. On Monday, they announced they were suing to reinstate their access.

“On Friday the press shop was blindsided,” POLITICO reported, as the directive happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town. Still, the latest retaliatory purge was as pathetic as it was predictable. Trump did not identify a specific false report or allege a security breach to justify his radical action. Instead, his stated offense was simply that these outlets had produced too many negative stories over too much time. By Saturday morning, reporters from all three outlets were turned away at the White House gates. 

Fox News barely let out a peep. And the rest of the White House press corps — the reporters who share vans and pool feeds and holiday parties with the people just banished — did what they have done for a decade now. Mostly nothing.

That appears to have changed Monday morning, when CNN was scheduled to serve as the television pool representative for the White House press corps. Late Sunday night, the administration announced it was banning CNN from serving in its previously scheduled slot as the television pool representative for the White House press corps — a marked escalation of the situation. In response, major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC and, notably, Fox News — agreed to suspend their pool coverage of Trump in solidarity with CNN. In a joint statement, the four networks, along with CNN, said, “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

New York Times reporter Peter Baker pointed out the historic nature of this event: “For the first time in my 30 years of covering the White House, the president will not have a network TV camera covering his everyday official actions and travels.”

At least until this point, Trump knew the press corps’ dirty little secret: It was far too late for symbolic outrage to substitute for collective action. The press has spent years teaching Trump that it is possible to divide journalists from one another. He recognized that much of the Washington press corps will deplore his conduct in a statement, and then show up for the next photo-op, fight for the next pool slot and keep treating access to an increasingly authoritarian White House as a professional prize. He believed, with good reason, that outlets like Fox News will even frame the exclusion of their peers as a partisan squabble in an effort to appear balanced. 

But Fox News has been here before.

In 2009, when Barack Obama’s White House tried to marginalize Fox News by excluding the network from an interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, the other television networks pushed back. The attempt was temporary — exclusion from one specific interview, not an announced and potentially expanding ban on multiple major outlets from White House grounds because their reporting offended the president. But the other four major television networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — refused to participate if Fox was excluded.

The Washington bureau chiefs delivered a clear ultimatum that either Fox News is allowed in the room, or nobody goes in. Jake Tapper, then at ABC, confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in the briefing room and asked him directly why it was appropriate for the government to declare a news organization illegitimate. (Fox lawyers later argued in court that hosts like Tucker Carlson cannot reasonably be considered legitimate sources of news.) Facing a unified front from a press corps that put constitutional principles ahead of commercial rivalries, the Obama administration backed down immediately. 

That moment demonstrated the power of absolute press solidarity. The networks did not defend Fox News because they agreed with its right-wing bias, but because they understood the precedent that would be set if a president were permitted to ban a critic from the room. Once the government establishes press facilities and admits credentialed journalists to gather news, it cannot hand access out according to ideological loyalty. 

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But that solidarity fractured in the years that followed. With Trump’s rise and his infamously leaky first term, White House reporters have seemingly surrendered to access journalism. When he descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, major television networks traded journalistic rigor for spectacle. They broadcast his rallies uninterrupted, handing him billions of dollars in free airtime to normalize his attacks on democratic norms. In 2018, the administration pulled CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials after he refused to hand back a microphone during a heated exchange. CNN sued, other outlets filed friend of the court briefs, and the administration eventually folded and restored his pass. Although imperfect, this response demonstrated that the old model still worked.

In 2025, Trump tried it again, this time against the Associated Press, after the wire service declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico on his say so. The AP sued. Fox News, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all filed amicus briefs on the AP’s behalf, and a Trump appointed district court judge, Trevor McFadden, ordered the ban lifted from the broader White House grounds, even as an appeals court let Trump keep the AP out of the Oval Office, Air Force One and Mar-a-Lago while the case proceeds. All the while, the president held press avails in which he continued to attack the press. 

Trump understands how to exploit every weakness the media has cultivated, like its addiction to spectacle. He insults a reporter, and the clip runs all day. He threatens a network, and the network gets a bump in attention. He calls the press “the enemy of the people,” then calls individual reporters when he wants to plant a story or manipulate a news cycle. He denounces the New York Times as “fake news,” then sits for lengthy interviews with its reporters when they are writing books he hopes will immortalize his preferred version of events. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump turned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins into a target of misogynistic ridicule while the assembled press corps remained seated. 

This breakdown of solidarity among the press corps has allowed Republicans to build a false narrative around media access. After Trump announced his ban on CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW, the conservative political machine rallied to defend the blatantly unconstitutional act with a familiar bait and switch. Trump allies like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., absurdly claimed no president has been more open to the press than Trump and mocked the idea that press access requires actual access. Scalise repeatedly parroted the debunked claim that Joe Biden revoked the credentials of 400 reporters, a distortion fact-checked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who noted that only one reporter was ever denied a credential under Biden. The rest simply hadn’t reapplied and were let in anyway. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz told CNN’s own Dana Bash that he backs banning her network. Fox News contributor Joey Jones, whose colleague Jacqui Heinrich is the current White House Correspondents’ Association president, casually remarked that he would not “shed a tear” over the banned journalists. Heinrich, Fox’s White House correspondent, rightly condemned the ban as an unequivocal violation of the First Amendment.

Fox’s opinion side has spent a decade building an audience that treats CNN’s misfortune as content. In that time, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit after internal communications revealed how Trump’s false election claims were knowingly aired and promoted.

But Monday morning’s news that at least some of the past solidarity has returned is heartening — and it stands as a rebuke to an out-of-control president and administration that thinks they can bulldoze the media into submission. Still, the damage has been done. While a legal victory for CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW is probable, it will in all likelihood come months from now, after the outlets have been shut out of covering the president during the most consequential midterm season in a generation. That is not the same as winning. 

Executive power cannot be checked by the courts alone; it must be checked by real-time resistance from reporters. Monday’s collective action is a meaningful first step. Now there should be another: while the lawyers argue the case in federal court, the rest of the White House press corps should make sure the chairs in the briefing room are empty.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect Monday morning’s news that ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC are suspending pool coverage in solidarity with CNN, and that CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW are filing suit to regain access to the White House.