Media Must Resist the DOJ’s Antitrust Attack on the Press

The Department of Justice has launched an antitrust investigation into ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News — demanding their internal communications about the White House TV pool. The networks’ alleged crime: briefly suspending pool coverage in solidarity after Trump illegally banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House grounds. A federal judge has already ruled that ban likely unconstitutional. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the DOJ probe exactly what it is: “a pretext for seeking records” about how networks cover the president.

This is retaliation dressed as law enforcement. The Sherman Act was written to protect consumers from monopolistic corporations — not to punish journalists for coordinating a collective act of press freedom. The DOJ is not protecting competition. It is seizing the communications of news organizations that stood together against a president who banned his critics from covering him. Every network that caved and kept filming after the ban is now watching the ones that resisted get subpoenaed for it.

We call on the media to cover this DOJ investigation not as an antitrust story, but as what the Reporters Committee, press freedom advocates, and any honest reading of the First Amendment confirm it to be: a sitting president using the Justice Department to punish journalists for solidarity. The networks should refuse to comply, fight in court, and report on their own targeting with the same aggression they would bring to any other government abuse of power. The public deserves a press corps that understands its own freedom is on the line.