After a chaotic weekend in the Trump-media standoff, it’s now a wait-and-see game for networks

Is the standoff over between the White House and the nation’s main broadcast networks? Not exactly.

Are we back to Square One? Also not exactly.

One week after three news outlets filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and his abrupt ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists from White House grounds, the extraordinary First Amendment showdown has morphed into a wait-and-see game. For now, the players are the White House and, collectively, the five major networks that form the TV pool: CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News.

And things have gotten murky.

Over the weekend, Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the decision to keep CNN off Air Force One on Saturday as the president traveled to a college football game in Tennessee, despite the fact that it was CNN’s turn to provide pool coverage of Trump. The rest of the pool declined to provide a replacement, in solidarity with CNN.

“The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane,” Blanche said in an interview Sunday with ABC. He said Trump was “sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news.” And he added that news coverage he described as “misinformation” amounted to a national security issue.

“That is what is a national security problem, when you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House,” he said.

A federal judge threw cold water on the national security argument in his ruling last week granting a temporary restraining order against the White House ban. “The Court is skeptical … that Defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation” for removal of access, Judge Timothy Kelly wrote.

But the ruling did not directly address the TV pool rotation, even though the news outlets’ lead attorney, Theodore Boutrous Jr., has said he believes the ruling applies to pool access.

And now pool access has become the battleground, with networks facing tough choices as the standoff persists with a president who, in his second term, has become increasingly willing to go to extreme lengths — in the courts, in the regulatory system and in his public statements — to quash coverage that he doesn’t like.

For now, a decision to act on a case-by-case basis

At one point on Friday, it seemed everything was more or less settled. CNN, which had been blocked from its pool duties by Trump’s ban — prompting the other networks to refrain from their own pool coverage in solidarity — was back in. The network fulfilled its pool duty at a visit by Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the National Archives. For the first time in days, CNN aired live footage of the president.

But then came CNN’s Air Force One setback on Saturday.

For now, networks in the pool have decided to address the ongoing standoff on a case-by-case basis, according to a person familiar with the pool’s operation, speaking on condition of anonymity to give details of ongoing discussions.

On Sunday, Fox covered a pool event; on Monday, NBC was covering the president in the Oval Office. CNN is not in the rotation until at least Thursday. If CNN is again barred from a pool event, the networks will decide together, presumably based on the newsworthiness of the situation, whether to provide a replacement or to refrain from coverage as they did previously.

Networks are ‘between a rock and a hard place’

The issues at stake are difficult. On the one hand, the networks want to take a stand on behalf of press freedom and against efforts to intimidate coverage. On the other, media outlets have an obvious purpose of providing news to their audiences.

“There are not a lot of good options,” said David A. Schulz, director of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

Should the White House continue to bar CNN, Schulz said, networks may choose to litigate, or to “exert their market power and say, ‘We’re not going to play ball with you.’”

The question, Schulz added, is: “Who’s going to back down first?”

The networks “may well feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place,” noted RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah.

“Capitulation might be perceived as abandonment of core components of press freedom,” Andersen Jones said. “But the practicalities of lengthy White House news blackouts are also complicated, and refusing to cover major news at the highest levels of government might itself feel like a failure to serve the goals of democracy.”

From Blanche’s weekend comments, it did not seem likely the White House was softening its stance.

“When it comes to the White House, it is the people’s house,” Blanche said, returning to an argument the administration has made since the beginning.

“It is a privilege, and not a right, to be there.”