The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into whether the White House Television Press Group’s decision to suspend news coverage of President Donald Trump violated antitrust laws.
The Justice Department said in a statement that it was examining whether the White House Press Group — a group of channels that includes CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC — violated the Sherman Act by temporarily stopping joint television coverage of Trump.
The Sherman Act is a federal law that prohibits certain agreements that unreasonably restrain trade. Introduced in the 1890s, the law has rarely been applied to media organizations, particularly in relation to their coverage.
Members of the press pool did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment sent outside of normal business hours.
The DOJ investigation follows the suspension of White House television press coverage of Trump on September 21, shortly after he banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.
In a Truth Social article, the president then said that these media outlets “should not be able to consistently write or report FICTIONS and LIES when covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America.”
A judge lifted restrictions on these journalists on September 24, several days after White House staff confiscated their press passes. Despite the decision, journalists from CNN and Politico were not allowed to travel with the president aboard Air Force One, the New York Times reported.
The Trump administration now faces a lawsuit from CNN, MS NOW and Politico for barring their journalists from the White House grounds.
Television coverage from the White House has also resumed.
The DOJ investigation marks a new escalation in an ongoing dispute between Trump and the media over press rights.
The Trump administration has moved to restrict news organizations that have produced critical coverage of its policies.
Last year, Trump moved to rescind about $1.1 billion previously approved for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, federal funding for public broadcasters NPR and PBS. Trump and his allies have also sued several media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and BBC News, over allegations of bias or inaccuracies in their reporting.
Seth Stern, chief advocacy officer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, called the DOJ investigation “nonsense.”
“Depriving Trump of the attention he craves does not constitute competitive harm, and in any case, antitrust law has long recognized First Amendment exceptions, even in cases of anticompetitive impact,” he said. “After all his rhetoric about ‘fake news,’ Trump is using the DOJ as a weapon to pressure networks he calls ‘the enemy of the people’ to stay in the White House. It’s a weird way of telling the press how much he missed them.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.
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