The White House has again excluded CNN from a rotating presidential press pool, despite a federal judge’s order temporarily blocking the Trump administration from restricting the network’s access to the White House.
CNN had been scheduled to join the group of news organizations travelling with President Donald Trump to Texas and Oklahoma on Thursday. However, the network was removed from the list of media outlets assigned to cover the trip, according to the White House schedule.
The move comes after a Trump-appointed federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the administration from barring CNN, Politico and MS Now from the White House.
The order remains in effect until October 8. Despite the ruling, CNN was also prevented from travelling aboard Air Force One to provide pool coverage over the weekend.
White House Defends Access Restrictions
Trump has rejected suggestions that excluding the outlets from certain presidential events violates the court’s order.
In an interview, the President said he was not required to give the news organizations access to every event involving him.
“I don’t have to go out of my way, these people write only bad stories,” Trump said.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung similarly argued that the court order restored the outlets’ access to the White House but did not require the administration to include them in every presidential press pool.
“The judge’s order required the president to restore the newsrooms’ access to the White House, but that’s different than allowing the pool into the events in the Oval Office or on Air Force One,” Cheung said.
The dispute has raised broader questions about the administration’s control over which news organizations can cover the President in more restricted settings.
Dispute Over Presidential Press Access
The latest confrontation follows a separate legal dispute involving the Associated Press and its access to what have been described as the White House’s “intimate spaces”.
Trump’s administration previously restricted the AP from those settings after the news organization declined to adopt the administration’s preferred name, “Gulf of America”, for the body of water traditionally known as the Gulf of Mexico.
The disputes have placed presidential press access at the centre of an ongoing legal and political battle between the Trump administration and several major news organizations.
CNN’s latest exclusion comes while the temporary court order protecting its White House access remains in force, leaving the scope of the administration’s authority over presidential press pools at issue.
