What is the White House press pool and why does it matter?

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The White House press pool covers and travels with the U.S. president every day, providing news outlets and the public with a near-constant stream of information on the leader's activities.
With the television pool suspending coverage of President Donald Trump after he banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, the public could be deprived of critical information about the president's activities.
The five networks that have made up the White House television pool — ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News — rotate each day by having one network that covers the president's daily movements in Washington and around the world and remarks he makes. They feed video to other news organizations, and it airs on television stations while also being used by journalists who are not in those spaces to report in real time what the president says.
The pool covers events that are widely open to the press and is in more limited spaces like awaiting the president underneath the wing of Air Force One and travelling with him aboard the plane. The pool also allows the press to be present — and therefore the public to have access to information — in spaces like the Oval Office, which does not have enough room to accommodate all of the hundreds of reporters covering the White House.
"The press pool serves as the public's eyes and ears inside the White House, since not all journalists, let alone all Americans, can be there themselves," said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. "[T]he public is entitled to hear how the president handles difficult questions, even if the answer is by berating those who ask. All of that becomes far more difficult, if not impossible, without a functioning press pool."
"The president's handpicked journalists don't need a First Amendment — its whole purpose is to protect the reporters the government doesn't want around," Stern said by email.
The pool has chronicled U.S. presidents every day for nearly a century, since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to the White House Correspondents' Association, which represents journalists who cover the White House and advocates for access to the president. Pool reporters brought the nation live coverage of events including the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Broadcast, still photographers, print or digital and radio reporters cover the president at the White House and when he travels, from each day's initial "call time" to when a "lid" is called — the time when staff alerts reporters that the White House says the president will not be seen again for the day.
For most of the press pool's history, the White House Correspondents' Association controlled which outlets covered the president on any given day. In recent years, this typically included a TV crew — a slot that rotated between ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News — a rotating "print" newspaper slot, a radio slot, and dedicated slots for still photographers and "wire" services like The Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg.
Trump's White House, however, has taken a heavier hand in pool coverage. 
In February 2025, the White House press office announced it would take control of determining the press pool that covered Trump. The administration has since made several changes to the composition of the pool that covers Trump, including the additions of secondary TV and print reporters and the elimination of the "wire" slot. The White House also added a "new media" seat, for which outlets not typically included in the press pool can apply to be chosen for by the White House press office. Outlets in the new media seat have ranged from right-wing influencers to startup media outlets. 
According to a 2025 analysis from the Poynter Institute, the White House's selection of the secondary TV and new media slot reporters has skewed towards conservative outlets.
The Trump administration also tried to suspend a CNN reporter's press credential in 2018 — although the attempt was unsuccessful and the reporter's credential was soon restored. In 2009, the Obama administration's Treasury Department attempted to exclude Fox News from a series of TV pool interviews with executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg amid tension between the Obama administration and the network. The administration, however, reversed course after pushback from the included TV outlets.
The pool gives the public extensive access to the president's activity and lets the president quickly summon reporters when the White House wants to widely disseminate information. The pool, which is coordinated by the White House Correspondents' Association, includes rotating representatives from participating news outlets, which pay for their journalists' travel with the president.
CNN was scheduled to be the TV network pool representative for the president's trip to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday.
The rest of the TV pool said they would not replace CNN in a backup capacity, effectively depriving live video footage from independent news media of the president's activity in New York.
Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.

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