CNN was left off the White House’s official travel pool for President Trump’s Saturday trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he is scheduled to attend the Tennessee-Texas football game, according to the “Daily Guidance and Press Schedule” released late Friday night.
In CNN’s place, the White House named conservative outlets Real America’s Voice and Lindell TV as the secondary television pool for the trip.
The exclusion came just hours after a federal judge restored CNN’s access to White House grounds, and after the network had resumed its normal pool duties earlier Friday to cover Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
CNN covered its own exclusion from the Knoxville trip as breaking news on Friday night. Jim Sciutto, filling in as host of “The Source,” introduced the story with a “BREAKING NEWS” banner.
“As we come on the air tonight, we do have breaking news that once again involves this network. CNN has been told that the White House is, once again, moving to bar our journalists from covering the president as part of the White House television press pool,” Sciutto said.
Sciutto noted the pool system CNN was left out of has been in place under both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, saying it exists “to document history.” He argued “this president alone appears intent on trashing that tradition because of news coverage he does not like.”
The on-screen chyron during the segment read, “WHITE HOUSE BARS CNN FROM COVERING TRUMP’S TRAVEL TOMORROW.” Anderson Cooper later broke into his own program with a separate “BREAKING NEWS” segment on the same development, bringing in White House correspondent Alayna Treene.
A report from Treene and CNN’s Brian Stelter described the move as part of “the Trump administration’s latest salvo against CNN.”
Background: A Week of Access Disputes
The Knoxville pool exclusion follows a chaotic week over press access to the White House. Late last week, Trump announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds, accusing the outlets of reporting “FICTION and LIES.”
“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump said.
Credentials for the affected outlets were denied and badges disabled following the announcement. A federal judge subsequently issued a temporary pause on the ban for those outlets.
Despite that ruling restoring their access, both MS NOW and CNN did not cover Xi Jinping’s state visit and his wife’s accompanying events. CNN did resume pool duties Friday for coverage tied to that visit before being left off the following day’s Knoxville trip list.
