Donald Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House prompted the other major networks, Fox News included, to suspend pool coverage in solidarity. An incensed Trump now has his Justice Department investigating the networks for violating antitrust law, as The New York Times explains:
In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having “proudly boycotted covering White House events.” “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” a core antitrust law, Ms. Covington wrote. ... In its letters on Friday, the Justice Department demanded copies of communications among network officials that concerned pool coverage of Mr. Trump, along with any communications about Mr. Trump’s revocation of CNN’s access to the White House grounds, according to two people with direct knowledge of the documents. ...
Organized boycotts can be considered anticompetitive if they are aimed at achieving commercial objectives, but not if their primary objective is political speech, said William E. Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Mr. Kovacic said. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”
The press pool exists to give the public continuous coverage of the president, which is why coordinated action among the networks that make it up is one of the few tools they have to push back against attacks on press freedom while lawsuits wind through the courts. The last time the major networks banded together this way, back in 2009, the Obama administration quickly reversed its decision to exclude Fox News from a round of interviews. Trump has opted instead to treat the networks’ solidarity as a cartel. The Sherman Act was written to break up the railroad and oil trusts of the Gilded Age. The administration is now wielding it against news organizations that declined to air footage of the president shaking hands with Xi Jinping.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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