TV networks deny Trump the one thing he craves most: Attention

Early Brief

September 22, 2026 at 5:31 a.m. EDT

Analysis by  Dan Merica

President Donald Trump had a really rough week last week. Crude oil prices kept spiking with no sign of abating. He lost his mail-in ballot case at the Supreme Court. The Fed didn’t listen to him and raised rates. A few Republicans voted against the Iran war. And poll after poll showed his party in a dire political position ahead of the midterms.

So what did the president do to turn things around? He banned three outlets — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — from the White House on Friday. On Saturday, when those outlets showed up to work, they were not allowed in.

The conflict came to a head today when the outlets filed a suit against the Trump administration, and the five major television networks halted video coverage of presidential events in solidarity with CNN.

As we wrote about yesterday, Trump has sparred with the media for years, long before he even ran for office. But both the timing and response have been compelling.

Trump’s administration is in a rough patch. The looming midterms could be a damning indictment of his first two years in office, and he seems unable — or unwilling — to address the war in Iran, the price shocks caused by his tariffs, and other main drivers of that anger.

This attempt to block reporters from the White House could be seen as a distraction — as a way to rally supporters around him as he opens a new front in his long-running war on what he calls “fake news.” The news media certainly isn’t particularly popular or trusted by Americans. But Trump’s ban does nothing to address the issues voters are facing, and it’s highly unlikely any voter will be moved — either way — by this fight with reporters.

That is why the real takeaway is how the TV network’s response to Trump deprives him of what he craves most: attention.

Covering the White House is a unique assignment. Because of space and cost constraints, the five networks create a so-called pool, rotating days where each outlet covers events involving the president for the entire group. This lets the president get his message out to all networks and gives him the platform he needs to push his administration’s message to the American people.

When Trump left the White House yesterday afternoon, no television cameras from the pool aired his departure, starving him of a chance to push his message. The White House attempted to counter this dynamic by live-streaming their own events. “Just the news that matters most — straight from the Trump Administration,” the White House X account said. But their post on his departure, which included him cutting the ribbon on a new White House helipad, was mostly just static helicopter noise, giving viewers no chance to hear what the president was saying.

The blackout mostly continued when he arrived in New York. And the real test of the network’s resolve will come on Tuesday, when Trump is slated to be at the United Nations, and there will be multiple venues where the pool would be one of the few cameras covering the president’s meetings with other world leaders.

Trump has long subscribed to the idea that all press is good press.

“Good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all,” Trump wrote in his book, “The Art of the Deal.”

But the coming days will test whether Trump is willing to accept less publicity altogether.