Trump Faces the Sting of a Media Boycott After Press Pool Withdrawal
A boycott of the White House press pool by the major networks deprives the president of the oxygen of screen time. But he is still finding ways to get on the air.
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White House Memo
After Years as the Star of Must-See TV, Trump Faces the Sting of Cancellation
A boycott of the White House press pool by the major networks deprives the president of the oxygen of screen time. But he is still finding ways to get on the air.
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· 11:31 min
Peter Baker started covering the White House in 1996 and has never seen a day when television networks refused to participate in the pool.
Published Sept. 21, 2026Updated Sept. 22, 2026, 8:21 a.m. ET
For President Trump, this is the tree-falls-in-the-forest moment of his administration. If the most television-addicted president in history suddenly finds the cameras missing, is he really still president? Not the kind he has been, anyway.
Mr. Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade. No longer can he snap his fingers and appear live in millions of homes. No longer does he totally dominate the airwaves.
Indeed, his first taste of life without the major television networks that are now boycotting the White House press pool in protest of his ban on select news outlets was a sour one. He was left almost literally shouting into the wind on Monday as he cut the ribbon on his new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House, recorded only by a second-tier news broadcaster that could not capture his voice over the roar of Marine One. There was Mr. Trump moving his mouth, and no one could hear him.
Yet when it comes to attracting attention, the president still manages to find a way. By the end of the day, there he was live on CNN after all — not filmed by the White House television pool, which refused to follow him, but by other cameras that met him when he arrived in New York and were not part of the boycott agreement. He had to rely on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get on air, not at his own White House but as a guest at Gracie Mansion in the heart of liberal America. But he crowed that he could still force his way onto the screen.
“They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me, so I wasn’t very worried about that,” Mr. Trump boasted with the mayor at his side and a large group of reporters in front of him. “Look at all that press.”
The moment reinforced the challenge of carrying out any kind of television blackout on the president in an age of proliferating media, and the limits of the news industry’s willingness to cut him off. While pool cameras will be gone for now, the networks under their agreement may still show footage from other sources that are not subject to White House control, like the United Nations camera feed that will carry his speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday.
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Originally published by nytimes.com. Syndicated material does not necessarily reflect the views of Glamour Canada.
