--- title: "The Networks Return to the Pool, and CNN’s Slot Stays Empty" description: "Four networks are set to resume covering Trump on Sunday under a tentative plan that lets his exclusion of CNN stand" author: "Inez Holloway" published: 2026-09-27T03:23:14.513Z modified: 2026-09-27T09:07:52Z url: https://rews.cc/a/the-networks-return-to-the-pool-and-cnn-s-slot-stays-empty-2aa4fc language: en tags: ["trump", "press", "cnn", "white-house", "media", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # The Networks Return to the Pool, and CNN’s Slot Stays Empty *Four networks are set to resume covering Trump on Sunday under a tentative plan that lets his exclusion of CNN stand* By Inez Holloway · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-networks-return-to-the-pool-and-cnn-s-slot-stays-empty-2aa4fc ## In brief - ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC are set to resume TV pool coverage of Trump on Sunday, per four people briefed - When CNN’s rotation turn comes, networks will decide whether to send a substitute or leave the slot empty - The quintet had suspended the pool after Trump barred CNN from the White House, withholding summit footage - A federal judge ordered CNN’s reinstatement Thursday but gave no explicit ruling on the smaller TV pool - The AP was barred from the press pool in 2025; its legal fight has run more than a year The cameras are going back on Sunday. Four of the five American television networks — ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC — are set to resume the small rotating arrangement by which one crew follows Donald Trump through his day and shares the footage with everyone else, according to four people briefed on the deliberations, as reported by the New York Times and carried by the Boston Globe. The fifth network in the arrangement is CNN. CNN is not coming back. When CNN’s turn arrives in the rotation, the plan goes: the other networks will decide, case by case, whether to send a substitute crew. Otherwise the slot will stand empty, and the president will simply not receive major-network coverage that day. The arrangement is tentative. It took shape late Friday and could dissolve again at any hour. So, for that matter, could the solidarity that produced it. That solidarity had cost something. Through the past week, the five networks suspended the TV pool entirely, refusing to cover the president, in an effort to force the White House to reinstate CNN after Trump barred its journalists from the grounds. The networks went so far as to withhold footage of portions of Trump’s summit with Xi Jinping. It was, by the standards of American broadcast institutions, an act of unusual nerve. It ended with a plan under which the exclusion CNN was protesting becomes, in effect, an open question the networks re-litigate every time it comes up in the schedule. The week had a shape to it. On September 18, Trump abruptly banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, saying he disliked their coverage. On Thursday, Judge Timothy J. Kelly of U.S. District Court in Washington ordered the outlets reinstated for two weeks, and made clear that CNN’s journalists should get back their hard passes — the badges admitting them to the grounds. The ruling said nothing explicit about the smaller TV pool, the one that follows the president into the Oval Office and onto Air Force One. The White House noticed the silence. On Friday the administration briefly behaved as though peace had broken out. CNN was allowed to provide pool footage of Trump and Xi’s visit to the National Archives; CBS lent a pool camera for Xi’s arrival at the White House that morning. Later that day, the administration withdrew CNN from the pool for Saturday’s trip to Tennessee. The pool went dark again when the other networks declined to substitute. By Saturday, the networks had stopped declining. The calculation, laid out in the Times account, was not really about CNN. If the pool stayed suspended indefinitely and an emergency occurred, the leaders said in private, there would be no cameras on the president at all, and the public would be left, in the phrase the people briefed used, “relatively in the dark.” They had weighed what they described as several unpleasant options. They had also consulted the precedent. The Associated Press was barred from the White House press pool in 2025; a federal court quickly restored its access, an appeals court mostly reversed that, and the litigation has now run more than a year. CNN’s own case is only beginning — the next hearing has not yet been scheduled — and network leaders believed, according to two of the people, that a long suspension of coverage was untenable. The major networks declined to comment on Saturday. Their earlier joint statement sits on the record: “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” Resuming the pool, as the Times noted, hands the president more control over which outlets get close to him, and it guarantees high-quality broadcast coverage of his days. These two outcomes are not obviously separable. The president, for his part, showed no sign of concession. He posted on Saturday, entirely in capitals: > Fake News should not be allowed in the White House!!! It has gone on far too long, at a tremendous cost to our country. The network leaders stressed that their new arrangement was ad hoc: if the White House was going to make last-minute decisions about which outlets could attend which presidential events, they said, then the pool would make its decisions at the last minute too. Everything is [no longer a principle](https://rews.cc/a/white-house-kicks-cnn-off-air-force-one-days-after-court-res-ca1f3e), on either side. Everything is a schedule, filled in or left blank. For Sunday, the schedules are filled in. The crews will be where they are supposed to be, the footage will go out, the rotation will turn — somewhere ahead of it, one slot arriving uncrewed, again and again, as long as nothing changes. The next hearing in the case has not yet been scheduled.