The Department of Justice is investigating ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News over an alleged coordinated boycott of White House press events, according to a Daily Mail report published Sunday. Officials have reportedly asked the networks to turn over internal communications and documents tied to their joint coverage decisions.
The inquiry focuses on the White House television pool, a long-standing arrangement in which broadcasters rotate responsibility for recording presidential events and sharing the footage with other outlets.
The investigation follows President Donald Trump’s decision in September to bar Politico, MS Now, and CNN from the White House, which he justified by accusing the outlets of reporting fake news.
DOJ spokeswoman Emily Covington addressed the matter Saturday, as cited by NBC News:
“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 restrain competition. Television networks are commercial competitors, but for years they have cooperated through the White House pool so that presidential events are recorded and distributed to the broader press corps. The DOJ is now examining whether that cooperation crossed a legal line when the networks reportedly withdrew their pool services in protest of the CNN ban.
The probe is part of a broader push by the Trump administration, dating to February 2025, to scrutinize what it views as bias in the media industry. That effort comes amid a historic collapse in public trust in journalism: a survey cited by Breitbart News in February found only six percent of American adults said they had a “great deal of confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interests,” the lowest level of trust in mass media in more than 50 years.
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