President Trump’s ejection of three major news outlets from the White House escalated Monday into a full-on battle with the media and could significantly hamper coverage of one of the most important weeks of his second term.
Mr. Trump departed the White House on Monday afternoon for the United Nations, where he will deliver an address Tuesday and meet with global leaders.
None of the major broadcast and cable networks went with him, leaving the president with an unprecedented lack of coverage from news cameras.
The news blackout emerged after four major media outlets, including CNN, banded together and declared they would boycott presidential coverage.
They have refused to substitute for CNN’s cameras after Mr. Trump ejected the outlet from the White House on Friday, along with Politico and MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, for producing “fake news.”
Mr. Trump’s ouster of the news outlets marks a significant escalation in his decade-long battle with the press.
It now threatens television coverage of the president for the foreseeable future and ahead of a momentous week in New York City and Washington.
After Mr. Trump’s appearance at the United Nations, he will host Chinese President Xi Jinping, who arrives in Washington on Wednesday. Mr. Trump is expected to take the rare step of greeting Mr. Xi at Joint Base Andrews for his state visit. A formal arrival ceremony at the White House and a state dinner are planned.
As it stands now, network pool cameras may not be there to record the events.
“Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president. This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place,” Fox News Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton, who heads the White House TV pool rotation, wrote to subscribers.
CNN was scheduled to provide TV coverage Monday for all the networks. On Saturday, CNN’s producers and reporters were locked out of the White House and had their badges confiscated. Journalists from MS NOW and Politico were also turned away.
When the White House asked ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News to pick a replacement for CNN for Monday’s pool duty, they all refused, leaving the president without a pool camera and boom mic that trails him at every public event and transmits the footage worldwide to cable and broadcast outlets and affiliates.
The New York Times and four additional outlets participating in the still photography pool Monday also announced they would “not publish or distribute” pictures.
It was unclear how long the news outlets’ boycott would last.
The battle silenced Mr. Trump on Monday in the mainstream media.
Appearing with construction workers at a White House ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new helipad, Mr. Trump began talking in front of a camera operated by Newsmax, but there was no audio. The pool-operated camera and boom microphone were not there to provide it.
The Newsmax anchor, noting the silence while Mr. Trump appeared to be talking, called it “maybe one example” of his media ban “backfiring just a little bit.”
Mr. Trump was not backing down.
He posted twice on social media Monday defending the ban, and his communications team sent out past news reports of the Obama and Biden administrations taking steps to restrict access or ban conservative media from White House coverage.
“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish,” Mr. Trump posted. “It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”
The Washington Times asked the White House to provide some examples of the coverage that led Mr. Trump to ban the three outlets.
In response, White House officials sent Mr. Trump’s Monday afternoon post on Truth Social in which he announced he would appeal a yet-undecided lawsuit filed Monday by the three outlets to regain access to the White House.
Mr. Trump predicted that the judge he appointed would rule in favor of the three outlets.
He vented about the media, calling the offending journalists “Third Rate Clowns, who purposefully distort, twist, and degrade with everything they write or publish.”
Noting the overwhelmingly critical coverage of his administration, the president said, “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country! No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean.”
Mr. Trump’s complaints are backed by the conservative-leaning Media Research Center.
The MRC published an analysis last year that found 92% of major network media coverage of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days of his second term in office was negative. In comparison, coverage of President Biden’s presidency was 59% positive, the study found.
The lawsuit filed by the three outlets to regain access has been assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly, a Trump appointee who has ruled against the president in the past. Arguments are slated for Wednesday.
Legal experts say the president is likely to lose his battle to ban news outlets in court.
A pool of journalists from print media and radio, as well as still photographers, continued to cover the president and traveled with him Monday afternoon to New York City, where he met first with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and was slated to sit down with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Mr. Trump, meeting with Mr. Mamdani, noted the large scrum of press that came to cover the sit-down between the two leaders, which was not covered by pool TV cameras but was reported by the print journalists.
“They said they would boycott me, but they would never boycott me. Look at all that press,” Mr. Trump said. “I think that outlets have an obligation to be fair. … I think I have an obligation not to let in fake news.”
The White House posts a live feed of Mr. Trump’s events on YouTube and Facebook.
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