President Donald Trump on Friday announced he is barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, telling reporters in the Oval Office that Breitbart News is the only outlet that covers him fairly.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post, writing the outlets would be excluded “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” He added that “Other Fake News Media Outlets” would follow.
Asked by Washington Examiner reporter Naomi Lim why the new ban would hold up in court given that a similar effort against CNN during his first term did not, Trump did not directly answer the legal question. Instead he turned to his broader complaints about press coverage of his presidency.
“I won the presidency. I won all seven swing states. I won the popular vote. I won 87% of the counties. That’s why the maps are all red when you look, except for two little blue lines on each side on each coast. I won a landslide, and I get no — I get I don’t get fair press. I get it from Breitbart. I get it from a little bit from Fox. Fox is the worst. I think Fox has, frankly, the worst polls in the whole business,” Trump said.
Trump argued that courts should not stand in the way of the White House restricting outlets he believes publish falsehoods.
“I don’t think that a court should allow fake news to be written day after day after day. I think that somebody has a right to keep them away, if they’re going to write false stories all the time,” Trump said.
He singled out the three outlets by name and made an unsubstantiated claim about Politico’s finances during the Biden administration.
“CNN is fake news. MS NOW is fake news. They’re fake news. They know it. They’re put there for a reason. Politico was bailed out by our government from going out of business. I don’t know if it was $8 million or something,” Trump said. “On occasion, it would be nice if we had some fairness. It’s all fake news.”
The move follows the administration’s February 2025 decision to bar Associated Press journalists from the Oval Office and Air Force One, a restriction that remains the subject of ongoing litigation.
For readers who value a free and adversarial press as a check on government power, the latest ban raises the same core question left unresolved by the AP case: whether a White House can pick and choose which journalists get access based on how favorably they cover the president. The administration has not detailed how it will implement the exclusion of CNN, MS NOW and Politico or how it expects the policy to withstand a legal challenge.
