White House Bars CNN From Air Force One for Trump’s Tennessee Football Trip

On Friday night the White House struck CNN off the passenger list for Air Force One. President Trump flies on Saturday to Knoxville, Tennessee, to watch the University of Tennessee play the University of Texas at football, and CNN was due to ride along as the day’s television pool — the small, rotating group of journalists that goes where space is tight and shares its pictures and notes with every other network. The seat was taken away hours after a federal judge had handed the network back its place at the White House itself.

Who got the seat instead depends on which account you read. The Associated Press reported that White House guidance named Real America’s Voice News, a conservative network that is not part of the pool. CNN’s own reporters said the schedule listed no replacement at all. RTÉ noted that the only television entry on the schedule was a “Secondary TV” crew from Lindell TV, an outlet run by the president’s ally, the businessman Mike Lindell. Business Insider, drawing on a Saturday pool report, put the result plainly: there would be no television pool for the trip, “meaning there won’t be widely available independent video of events.”

That is what the quarrel is really about. The pool has existed for decades, set up by the White House Correspondents’ Association so that a rotating roster always travels with the president and reports back for everyone else. Five broadcast networks take turns. The White House does not normally pick among them.

A week’s work of exclusion

The fight began on Sept. 18, when Trump announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds, accusing them of reporting “FICTION and LIES.” The ban also kept CNN from its pool duties when the president flew to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The three outlets sued on Monday. Early on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly temporarily struck the ban down, ordering access restored for 14 days and finding it was likely unconstitutional.

But the judge’s order addressed the “hard passes” that get a reporter through the gate. It said nothing directly about pool duties, and nothing at all about Air Force One. The White House has driven its truck through that gap.

For a few hours on Friday, normal life seemed to resume. Journalists from the three banned outlets walked back into the executive complex with cameras and laptops, and CNN took its pool turn, airing live pictures of Trump and President Xi Jinping of China touring the National Archives with Melania Trump and Peng Liyuan — the first live video of the president the network had carried in days. “As of now, all systems are go,” one person familiar with the pool told the AP. According to Fortune, the calm did not last the day: that evening, MS NOW’s Laura Barrón-López and two CNN journalists were turned away from the arrival ceremony for Xi’s state dinner. Then came Friday night’s guidance for the plane.

Theodore Boutrous Jr., the lawyer for the three outlets, said on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper earlier Friday that the plaintiffs believe the court ruling covers pool access too. The judge has given the organizations until Monday to seek a preliminary injunction, which would hold the ban off for longer. What Friday night means for that case is not yet clear.

The other networks said no

When CNN was first barred, the four other members of the television pool — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News — refused to take its place. “No administration should restrict a news organisation because it objects to its reporting,” the five networks said in a joint statement. Nearly 50 news organizations signed a friend-of-the-court brief assembled by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the New York Times and Washington Post said they would hold off running pool photographs. Fox News had stood with CNN once before, in 2018, when the White House barred its correspondent Kaitlan Collins from an event.

Trump answered in his own words on Saturday morning. “FAKE NEWS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!” he wrote on Truth Social. “IT HAS GONE ON FAR TOO LONG, AT A TREMENDOUS COST TO OUR COUNTRY.”

None of this is new in kind. Early last year the president banished Associated Press reporters from White House events because the wire service would not follow his executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” A federal judge ruled for the AP; the administration is appealing. The method is the same each time: not an argument with what was reported, but a lock on the door.

What it is for

Symone Sanders-Townsend, once Vice President Kamala Harris’s chief spokesperson and now an MS NOW host, told Fortune she had often braced for a hard day when a hostile reporter held the pool slot. “But it never crossed my mind that I could say I don’t want them here,” she said. “There is a difference between rights on paper and rights in practice... We cannot allow that right to become a right on paper and not a right in practice.”

She was blunt about the purpose. “This is a White House and this is an administration where retribution is actually a feature, not a bug,” she said. “The president literally ran on ‘I will be your retribution.’” And she noted the calendar: it is happening less than 40 days before the midterm election. Most voters learn the results from news outlets, not from county websites. “If this president can convince a large swath of Americans that the news organizations cannot independently be trusted to tell them the truth, well, then he can claim that these organizations calling the election are actually lies.”

She also pointed out that the president, for all his curses, keeps watching. “In one breath, he will lambaste the media and literally drag the media apparatus through the mud,” she said. “But in another breath, he cares very much so about the coverage. He watches MS NOW. The people at the White House watch our network.”

The presidents of the White House Correspondents’ Association, past and present, made the structural case on Fox News Sunday. “That’s the system that allows the networks to share video of the president with the whole country. If they aren’t there, the pool can’t function,” said Jacqui Heinrich, the current president. Her predecessor, Weijia Jiang of CBS, named the thing by its name: “America cannot have state TV... if the government is only showing you what it wants, then you have to question: what are we missing?”

The White House, which produces its own live streams, did not respond to requests for comment from several outlets. As of Saturday morning, the only pictures of the president at the Tennessee game that Americans can count on are the ones his own staff chooses to send out.