The White House press pool, a rotating cast of news outlets that covers the president, is now a battleground over free speech rights between President Donald Trump and the media.
On Monday, the issue headed for the courts as CNN, MS NOW and Politico sued the administration over being barred from the White House and, they contend, denied their First Amendment rights. CNN was banned from its scheduled pool duty for the day — and the pool announced that
it was canceling its coverage of Trump.
“Effective today, there would be no network pool coverage of the president's events,” the television pool of five broadcasters wrote in an email to its subscribers. "This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”
But the pool is a proxy for the wider fight over whether the president, or anyone, can control the content of news reports — a type of free speech, pillar of American democracy. The developments marked an extraordinary escalation in Trump's ongoing efforts — from the courts to the Pentagon to the White House — to restrict news reporters and outlets that he finds insufficiently supportive.
Again and again during Trump’s second presidential term, his irritation has focused on the rotating group of reporters who cover the president as representatives of the larger press corps. The practice ensures coverage can be disseminated broadly since not all journalists can be with the president at any given time due to space constraints.
But the pool also is an institution steeped in tradition and anchored in the Constitution's guarantee of a free press. The relationship between elected American leaders and the journalists who hold them accountable is designed to be adversarial. That's essential for knowing what the president and his administration are — or are not — doing in the United States' name, with taxpayer money.
Here's a look at various aspects of the White House pool.
CNN is one of the major news networks, including ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC, that are part of a TV pool managed by the networks' editorial leaders. The networks rotate coverage of presidential events. On Friday, Trump said he was barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House due to what he called unfavorable coverage and “fake news,” and threatened that more such media bans could be coming.
Reporters from all three were denied entrance to the White House grounds the next day. On Monday, the three outlets said they've notified the administration that they will file a lawsuit saying their First Amendment rights had been violated. The complaint also contends that the abrupt confiscation of access violated the networks' Fifth Amendment right to due process.
Also Monday, CNN was scheduled to travel with the president to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, but a scheduling email from the White House did not name the network. A responding email from the pool said there would be no replacement for CNN — pushback to any notion that the White House can decide who is in the pool and who is out.
The First Amendment to the Bill of Rights states that the government “shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The Trump administration has long insisted that nobody has the right to ask the president questions, especially in the White House — and that goes for members of the pool, whom the president routinely insults in personal terms.
The White House press pool is group of news outlets that ideally are almost everywhere the president goes: in the Oval Office, at state dinners, on Air Force One, in the motorcade, and when the president goes golfing or biking. It is also always on standby in case something happens in the world about which the president needs to speak to the nation.
Last year, the Trump White House upended a decades-long tradition of an independent association of journalists selecting members of the pool. The White House now picks and chooses which members of the media make up the pool, and they almost always select journalists who are outwardly favorable to Trump as part of the mix.
The pool distributes in-person reports and imagery to the broader corps covering the president. When a “pooled” event is over, the print, television and radio poolers share written notes, video and audio with everyone else who is interested.
Traditionally, the White House press pool represents every media format and daily includes The Associated Press and other wire-service writers, the AP and other outlets' photographers, a television crew, a radio correspondent and writers for print and online publications.
The pool was in President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas when he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. That allowed for firsthand accounts of the event as conspiracy theories spread, an example of why independent reporting is critical to understanding what is happening around the president.
Trump is famous for courting reporters even as he publicly criticizes them. And he’s not the first to try to go around traditional outlets.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his fireside chats over the radio as some of the nation’s biggest newspapers took issue with government expansion under the New Deal. More recently, television and social media have provided similar workarounds.
In 1798, John Adams signed the Sedition Act, which made it a crime for citizens to “print, utter, or publish ... any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government and used it to jail journalists, according to the National Archives. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson threatened to end presidential briefings with reporters, resulting in the creation of what became the White House Correspondents’ Association that exists today.
