Daniel Grimes

I was able to get onto the White House grounds today with my press pass and it's wrong that my colleagues at @CNN, @MSNOWNews, and @politico are not. It might seem like "inside baseball" to care about which news organizations have access to the president, but consider it this way: Do you want any U.S. president to determine which journalists get to cover them or what visuals of them get shared with the public? I certainly don't. CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO are suing to regain access. In the meantime, the five major TV networks (CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC) have announced they will stop providing TV pool coverage of President Trump because of the ban. They released a joint statement saying: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.” For context, the network TV pool is a complex rotation of the five major networks that ensures any public presidential event is covered on-camera. The networks invest a ton of money, time, and resources to make sure a TV crew is wherever the president is -- in the Oval Office, boarding Air Force One, speaking on AF1, visiting another state or country, on vacation, etc. News outlets big and small rely on the network TV pool to get footage when we are not able to be there. It's a vital resource that costs each network boatloads of money to keep staffed. News outlets pay for, among other things, their seats on AF1, their seats in the motorcade, their hotel rooms, food, equipment, and more. While the typical White House press pool also consists of print reporters, radio journalists, and still photographers, the lack of a TV pool camera leads to a scenario where the only video being produced is directly from the White House's own video crew. This week alone, President Trump is set to meet with multiple world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in NYC and host Chinese President Xi Jinping here at the White House. Without the network TV pool, what video the public gets to see will be restricted to what the Trump Administration wants out there. The slippery slope of this all? It leads to less accountability and less visibility into the presidency, which we all as Americans elect and fund. It would be just as wrong if a Democratic president did this. Just like it was wrong when a scaled-down version of events happened during President Obama's time in office. Per CNN: "The Obama administration briefly tried to exclude Fox News from a round of interviews with Kenneth Feinberg, then-administrator of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, that was offered to the other four networks in the TV pool. But outcry from the other networks led to Fox being reinstated. And the Obama team never sought to exclude Fox from acting as the daily network TV pool." cnn.com/2026/09/20/politics/… The First Amendment is clear: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."