The Department of Justice is investigating ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News over an alleged coordinated boycott of White House events, after President Donald Trump moved to bar CNN and other outlets from the briefing room.
According to a Daily Mail report published Sunday, DOJ officials have asked the five networks to turn over internal communications and documents concerning their joint coverage arrangements. The inquiry focuses on the White House television pool, a decades-old system in which broadcasters rotate responsibility for recording presidential events and sharing the footage with the rest of the press corps.
The probe follows President Trump’s September decision to ban Politico, MS Now, and CNN from the White House, which he said was a response to what he characterized as fake reporting.
NBC News reported comments from a DOJ official explaining the legal basis for the investigation. Department spokeswoman Emily Covington said Saturday:
Members of the television press pool have boycotted covering White House events. Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act. The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.
The Sherman Act bars certain agreements between businesses that unlawfully restrain competition. The networks are commercial competitors, but for years they have cooperated through the pool system to guarantee that presidential events get recorded and distributed to the broader press. The DOJ is now examining whether that long-standing cooperation crossed into illegal coordination when the networks withdrew pool services in protest of the CNN ban.
The investigation comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration, dating to February 2025, to scrutinize what it views as bias across the media industry. That effort has unfolded against a backdrop of collapsing public confidence in journalism: a survey earlier this year found trust in mass media at its lowest point in more than 50 years, with just six percent of American adults saying they had a great deal of confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interest.
