The US Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether the five major television networks violated federal antitrust law when they briefly halted pool coverage of President Donald Trump amid his administration’s attempt to bar certain journalists from the White House.
The New York Times reported late Saturday that DOJ officials “contacted networks on Friday and demanded communications and materials related to the White House TV pool.” ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News rotate the responsibility of capturing and distributing footage of the president. The networks paused pool coverage last month after the Trump administration dropped CNN from its scheduled pool assignment.
Emily Covington, a spokesperson for the Justice Department, confirmed the existence of the investigation in a statement on Saturday, saying that “group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act.”
Press freedom organizations and other critics condemned the probe as a politically motivated attack on journalism and questioned the administration’s expressed concern about antitrust violations—particularly given that the DOJ has effectively abandoned antitrust enforcement during Trump’s second term.
Bruce Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the investigation “appears to be a pretext for seeking records from the networks about how they are covering daily White House events during a media ban the president himself put in place.”
“The decisions news organizations make about coverage are protected by the First Amendment, and summoning antitrust authority, on top of the retaliatory actions the White House has already taken to bar certain outlets, is another and even more brazen attempt to try to intimidate journalists,” said Brown.
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the investigation “nonsense.”
“The investigation is nonsense. Trump may view the presidency as a business venture, but news outlets’ standing up for their constitutional rights has nothing to do with antitrust law, no matter what Laura Loomer says,” Stern added, pointing to the far-right activist’s public call for an antitrust lawsuit against the major TV news networks. “Depriving Trump of the attention he craves is not a competitive harm, and in any case, antitrust law has long recognized First Amendment exceptions even when there is anticompetitive impact.”
News of the DOJ investigation came after CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued the president over his attempt to bar the outlets from the White House. Late last month, a Trump-appointed judge ordered the administration to restore White House access to the outlets as the lawsuit proceeds.
Jonathan Kanter, who headed the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division under the Biden administration, told CNN on Saturday that the media networks’ actions in the wake of the attempted White House ban are “not even in the same zip code of an antitrust violation.”
“It’s literally freedom of speech,” said Kanter. “It’s no more an antitrust violation than the reporters coming together to form the pool in the first place.”