Antitrust or Payback? The Justice Department Is Investigating the Networks That Stood With CNN

Posted Monday, October 12, 2026 10:03 am

David Hucks (via MyrtleBeachSC)

A federal competition law written to bust railroad and oil trusts is now aimed at five newsrooms that stopped sharing camera footage of the president for four days as the DOJ is investigating the networks that stood with CNN. Here’s what happened, what the government is claiming, and why it matters for anyone in South Carolina who wants to see their government in action.

Oct 12, 2026 · @x.com/myrtlebeachnews

For most of a week in late September, Americans watching the evening news saw something almost unheard of: the President of the United States traveling, speaking and hosting a foreign head of state without the usual live network camera trailing him. Now the federal government wants to know whether the networks that made that choice broke the law.

The Justice Department has confirmed it is investigating whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News violated federal antitrust law when they jointly paused the shared “pool” coverage of President Donald Trump after the White House shut CNN out of its turn in the rotation [CBS News, 2026].

A department spokesperson framed the networks’ move as a boycott by commercial competitors, the kind of coordinated conduct the Sherman Act can prohibit, and said the Antitrust Division is simply determining whether the law was broken [CBS News, 2026]. According to reporting first published by The New York Times and summarized by Straight Arrow News, investigators have already demanded internal communications and records about how the pool operates [Straight Arrow News, 2026]. This situation has led to significant public interest, especially in light of the ongoing discussions around Investigating the Networks.

“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.

“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.

The thread running through every account of this story is a single question: was this a business cartel squeezing a customer, or a group of journalists refusing to let the government choose which reporters get to cover it? How that question gets answered will shape press access well beyond Washington.

Investigating the Networks: Implications for Press Freedom

How a Press Ban Became a Blackout

“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.

“Even more bizarre than the administration’s legal theory is that after all his ‘fake news’ rhetoric, Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to pressure the networks he calls the ‘enemy of the people’ to stay at the White House. It’s a weird way of telling the press how much he missed them.” said Freedom of the Press Foundation Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern

“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.

“Even more bizarre than the administration’s legal theory is that after all his ‘fake news’ rhetoric, Trump is weaponizing the DOJ to pressure the networks he calls the ‘enemy of the people’ to stay at the White House. It’s a weird way of telling the press how much he missed them.” said Freedom of the Press Foundation Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern

“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.” wrote Seth Stern

To understand the investigation, start with the pool itself. Five networks have long split the job and the expense of filming presidential events, rotating duty and handing the footage to news outlets around the world [The New York Times via GV Wire, 2026]. The arrangement exists because there often isn’t room in the Oval Office, on Air Force One or at a motorcade stop for every crew [NewscastStudio, 2026].

The dispute began on Sept. 18, when the president announced that CNN, MS NOW and Politico were barred from the White House over coverage he labeled “fake news,” and their staffers’ credentials were pulled [Variety, 2026]. CBS News later reported that the White House sent each outlet letters claiming certain stories, including reporting on the new ballroom, the Iran war and the Republican midterm convention, threatened national security and fell short of standards of decorum [CBS News, 2026].

On Monday, Sept. 21, CNN was scheduled to handle pool duty for Trump’s trip to the United Nations, and the White House refused to let it [The New York Times via GV Wire, 2026]. That afternoon, the pool’s chair, Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, notified members that the TV pool would stop covering presidential pool events because of the White House’s position [Variety, 2026]. All five networks issued a joint statement arguing that the public deserves independent information about its government and that no administration should punish a news outlet for its reporting [FOX 13 Tampa Bay, 2026].

The effect was immediate. The president’s helipad dedication and his UN trip went forward without live network television [Euronews, 2026], and there was no pooled network video of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s White House visit [The National News Desk via ABC News 4, 2026]. After U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered access restored for the three banned outlets, the pool came back on Friday, Sept. 25, with CBS working the White House and CNN covering Trump and Xi at the National Archives [TheWrap, 2026]. Even then the situation stayed unsettled: the Boston Globe reported that the White House again blocked CNN from the pool that weekend, and that the other four networks planned to resume while leaving CNN’s slot empty rather than fill it [Boston Globe, 2026].

The Government’s Theory: A “Group Boycott”

That sequence of events is what the Justice Department now calls a boycott. Its legal hook is the Sherman Act, the 1890 law that forbids agreements among competitors that unreasonably restrain trade [CBS News, 2026]. CBS News noted it was not immediately clear how the department believes a coverage pause fits that definition [CBS News, 2026].

The strongest version of the government’s argument goes something like this: five rival companies that normally compete for viewers and ad dollars agreed together to stop producing a product, presidential video, in order to pressure a third party. In antitrust law, coordinated refusals to deal among competitors have historically drawn harsh scrutiny, and one outlet tracking the case reported that the department considers the pause a commercial group boycott and has issued civil investigative demands, a pre-lawsuit form of subpoena [Azat TV, 2026].

Cornell constitutional law professor Michael Dorf told NPR that even a politically motivated investigation would not automatically protect the networks if a court found real wrongdoing, though their conduct would be judged on whether it was reasonable [NPR, 2026]. That is the uncomfortable part for press advocates: a bad motive behind an investigation is not, by itself, a legal defense.

The Case Against the Case

Yet the government’s theory has serious holes, and they start with the pool itself.

Dorf put it pointedly: if agreeing not to cover the White House is illegal, it’s hard to see why agreeing to cover it together, which is what the pool is, would be legal [NPR, 2026]. The pool has operated for decades as a cooperative among rivals. Washington never treated it as a cartel when the networks were sharing the footage; it is only being described that way now that they stopped.

There is also the question of who was harmed. Antitrust law exists to protect competition and consumers, typically from higher prices or reduced choices. Nobody pays the networks for pool footage, and during the suspension any outlet was still free to cover public presidential events on its own; it simply lacked the shared feed [NewscastStudio, 2026]. One analysis of the case argued that denying a politician airtime is not the kind of competitive injury the law addresses [CNBC, 2026].

Finally, there is long-standing Supreme Court precedent on point. In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982), the Court held that a boycott aimed at political and social change is protected expression under the First Amendment. By contrast, in FTC v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association (1990), it ruled that lawyers who refused work to win higher fees were engaged in an ordinary economic boycott. The networks’ stated goal, restoring a colleague’s access, looks far more like the first case than the second. They gained no price increase or market share; if anything, they gave up footage of a major state visit.

Press-freedom groups have been blunt. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Jose Zamora called the probe an effort to intimidate outlets defending press access [Straight Arrow News, 2026]. And according to Deadline, the idea of using antitrust law to punish the networks had been floated publicly last month by Trump ally Laura Loomer [Deadline, 2026].

An Old Playbook

If this feels new, it isn’t. Using antitrust enforcement against unfriendly news organizations has a documented history.

The Columbia Journalism Review has recounted how the Nixon administration pursued antitrust actions against the three broadcast networks, filed in 1972, while a top aide privately described the pending case as leverage over the networks’ coverage [Columbia Journalism Review, 2017]. During Trump’s first term, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press warned courts that selective enforcement of antitrust laws to punish or reward news coverage was a real risk, in a dispute over the AT&T-Time Warner merger that included CNN [Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 2018].

Today’s media landscape adds another wrinkle. CBS News and CNN now share a parent company, Skydance, after the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger closed this month [CBS News, 2026], which means two of the five networks under investigation sit inside a corporation whose business depends heavily on federal regulators. That kind of exposure is exactly why critics worry an investigation, regardless of its outcome, can chill coverage.

Why It Matters on the Grand Strand

It would be easy to see this as a fight among Washington and New York media giants. It isn’t.

The pool footage is the raw material that local stations across South Carolina use when they show the president on the evening news. When that feed stops, viewers in Conway, Georgetown and Myrtle Beach see less of their government, not more. And the precedent at issue reaches every level: the core question is whether a government can pick which reporters are allowed in the room and then penalize the rest of the press for objecting.

That principle doesn’t stop at the White House gate. Local reporters in Horry and Georgetown counties regularly deal with public bodies that would rather control who asks questions, from records requests that stall to press conferences that quietly exclude certain outlets. If the federal government establishes that newsrooms acting together to defend access can be treated as an illegal cartel, it hands every county council, sheriff’s office and state agency a template for discouraging the press from standing together.

Notably, the pool’s chair during the walkout was Fox News’s own bureau chief [Variety, 2026]. Whatever viewers think of any of these networks’ politics, this was not a partisan bloc. It was a rare moment where competitors across the spectrum agreed that the government shouldn’t get to choose its reporters.

Conclusion

The Justice Department may ultimately close this investigation without filing anything; inquiries often end that way. But an investigation can do its work without a lawsuit. Demands for internal emails about how networks decide to cover the president, delivered while those same networks are in court over White House access, send a message on their own [Straight Arrow News, 2026].

Meanwhile the underlying access fight continues. Judge Kelly extended his temporary order while he weighs the case, even as the White House has kept CNN and Politico out of the Oval Office and off Air Force One [CBS News, 2026].

The test for South Carolinians, and for every American, is simple: apply the same rule regardless of which network or which president is involved. If a future administration banned Fox News and the other networks walked out in solidarity, would we want the Justice Department demanding their emails? The answer to that question is the answer to this one.