Well, bless their hearts. The big broadcast networks decided to hold a solidarity walkout over the White House press pool, and now they’re shocked, shocked I tell you, that somebody in Washington actually read the rulebook back to them.
Here’s what happened, plain as a fence post. On Sept. 18, President Trump banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House grounds, griping about their coverage of him. Three days later, the five networks that run the TV pool, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN, suspended pool coverage in protest. The pool chair said it followed “the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties.” The outlets sued, a federal judge slapped a temporary restraining order on the ban on Sept. 24, and the networks went back to work. Case closed? Not hardly.
Because now the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has opened an investigation into whether that little walkout was itself a “group boycott” under the Sherman Act. DOJ spokesperson Emily Covington put it in a statement: “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 New York Times first reported the probe.
Now, I have questions for the manager, and the manager in this case is whoever taught these networks civics. You five are commercial competitors. You share costs, you rotate duties, you split the footage like a church potluck casserole. And when one of you got sent to the principal’s office, the other four locked arms and refused to cover the President of the United States. That’s not journalism, hon, that’s a cartel in matching windbreakers. If five oil companies did that, these same anchors would be breathless about it before the commercial break.
And let’s be honest about what the pool actually is. It’s not some sacred constitutional institution. It’s a cost-sharing arrangement, a carpool with better lighting. The Constitution protects your right to publish. It does not guarantee you a seat in the driveway. The networks sued saying the ban violates their right to speak freely, and the judge agreed to press pause for two weeks, fine, that’s the courts doing court things. But nobody appointed the TV pool as the fourth branch of government, no matter how many of them talk like it at the awards shows.
Here’s the part where I’ll allow a small sigh. I’m not wild about any administration pointing the Justice Department at its critics, and I’d say that same thing with a different name in the Oval Office, because principles that only work one way aren’t principles, they’re team jerseys. But the networks wrote this play themselves. They spent years telling us that collusion among competitors is the sin of sins, that nobody’s above the rules, that enforcement is accountability. Then they coordinated a walkout in the middle of a constitutional standoff and expected a participation trophy.
You can see it with your own eyes. The same people who lecture us every evening about threats to democracy treated a rotating camera assignment like a hostage negotiation. Meanwhile a judge is sorting out the actual legal question, which is the ban, and that’s where it belongs. The DOJ poking at the boycott is the spicy part, but the networks handed them the recipe.
So no, I won’t be lighting a candle for the TV pool. They stood together, they made a spectacle, and now they get to explain it to the antitrust lawyers. That’s just how it works, hon. You don’t get to run the boycott and the pity party at the same time.