Trump’s White House Press Ban Unintentionally Hurts MAGA Media Too

By Justin Baragona|Zeteo

Photos: YouTube Screenshots|Wikimedia Commons

When a Newsmax anchor admitted this week that Donald Trump’s press ban was “backfiring just a little bit,” many took it as the president finally being deprived of that sweet narcotic of television coverage, which is what he craves more than oxygen itself.

And while that is certainly true, what quickly became apparent is that Trump barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House was also hurting the MAGA media landscape to the point that they desperately needed this ban to be reversed in short order.

Trump himself even seemed resigned to the fact that his gambit would soon be overturned in court, grumbling on Tuesday night that the three outlets have a “great, for them, and totally disloyal Judge” who would likely side with their lawsuit. With the Justice Department invoking “national security” to justify the ban, an emergency court hearing was held this afternoon, where the judge seemed inclined to grant the outlets’ request for a temporary restraining order and restore their access. (Status scooped this evening that one of the sources behind a story the White House cited to justify its ban of Politico was none other than Vice President JD Vance.)

In the aftermath of Trump’s authoritarian attack on the free press, which appears to have been set off by something his close aide Natalie Harp showed him, there has been an impressive show of solidarity among the White House press corps. Leading that charge has been none other than pro-Trump cable juggernaut Fox.

“The American people, through a free and independent press, must be able to scrutinize those elected to power, regardless of whether government officials view it favorably,” White House Correspondents Association president Jacqui Heinrich, who is also a Fox correspondent, declared this weekend. “The WHCA calls on the administration to immediately restore our colleagues’ access.”

Heinrich also brought on CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, her predecessor as WHCA chief, to denounce Trump’s press ban on Fox’s airwaves. “America cannot have state TV,” Jiang said on Heinrich’s Sunday show. “That’s what makes America America. That’s why we need independent coverage, and that’s why this press pool system has been set up for so long.”

With CNN as one of the five members of the White House television pool, the rotating chair – Fox Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton – noted to pool members on Monday that there would be no network television coverage of the president for the foreseeable future. Those five member networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox – soon released a joint statement saying “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

This show of force by Fox and its journalists, however, placed the right-wing network in something of an awkward position. While they publicly opposed Trump’s move, the network offered little on-air coverage of the press ban on Monday and Tuesday, aside from a handful of short news reads and a panel discussion on Bret Baier’s nightly news broadcast.

They could be ignoring it on-air not to elicit any additional rage from Trump and his Fox-watching supporters, but even the network’s MAGA hosts and pundits have been holding back in their attacks on their liberal cable news rivals. And, quite frankly, angrily mocking CNN and MS NOW is half of the lifeblood of the shows hosted by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld.

However, it’s Fox’s smaller MAGA media competitors that are really feeling the crunch of the Trump press ban and the White House press corps’ response to it.

With no television pool feed, low-budget pro-Trump streamers like Right Side Broadcasting Network and Lindell TV – which largely carry live and unfiltered footage of Trump rallies and events – are suddenly shit out of luck amid the media boycott.

“For everything the second Trump administration has done to juice the conservative content creation machine, it can’t work well if there’s no video,” political journalist Jake Lahut reported, adding: “It’s unclear how long this post-banning status quo will continue. Yet there already appears to be an immediate, obvious threat to the business model of the RSBNs and Lindell TVs of the world.”

Indeed, much like Newsmax and the rest of the conservative media sphere, they were stuck carrying the same inaudible White House livestream on Monday of the president unveiling his new helipad.

Of course, I guess they can always turn to “Trump TV,” the White House’s attempt to circumvent the TV pool that has been likened to “state-run media.” However, the 24/7 feed appears to be mostly an ongoing reel of Trump highlights that has so far attracted little attention. (There were 609 viewers when I checked Tuesday night.)

As for Newsmax, unlike Fox, the little-watched network flooded its airwaves with pro-Trump commentary about the press ban, with its cartoonishly MAGA anchors largely taking the president’s side while gleefully trashing “fake news” CNN and MS NOW. (Naturally, much of it lined up with talking points the White House sent out to allies.)

“It’s about ban time. Anybody get that one play on words? I like it. I think it’s just rich. They deserve it. I mean, look at the way they have treated him,” host Greg Kelly sneered on Tuesday night.

Still, for all of the right-wing network’s on-air Trump boosterism and grandstanding, Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy – who claims he’s a close confidant of Trump – declared on Tuesday that the president had “overreacted” by banning the three news organizations, saying he urged Trump to “reconsider” the “unprecedented” move. (He reiterated that position in a statement to the New York Times on Wednesday.)

On top of that, Ruddy also said Newsmax was “not siding” with the White House and wouldn’t serve as an alternate TV pool replacement. (CNN reported that other broadcasters have also declined the White House’s request to fulfill TV pool duties.)

Ruddy saying Newsmax won’t jump in to take over TV duties shouldn’t be looked at solely through an altruistic lens. As the New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum explained this week, the major networks that make up the TV press pool are shouldering a large financial burden.

“It is so expensive to staff the president with a cameraman, an audio producer, a correspondent, and they essentially all share the costs,” Grynbaum said on ‘The Daily’ podcast. “So if CNN suddenly was not participating in a five-network pool, that’s a 20% spike in the financial outlay that these other networks would have to pay in order to keep up their responsibilities in the pool.”

Even if a small cable channel like Newsmax or One America News, whose newsrooms and budgets are minuscule compared to Fox, CNN, or broadcast news, were willing to take on the burden of the television press pool, could they even pull it off?

Regardless, with Trump appearing to be on the losing end of his latest attack against the free press, the conservative infotainment complex may soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that they can go right back to sponging off the mainstream media while simultaneously trashing it.

‘60 Minutes’ Continues to Be Bari’d

Following its lowest-rated season debut this century, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss’s revamped version of ‘60 Minutes’ was hoping to get a big ratings boost from its blockbuster interview with Patrick Clancy, the ex-husband of accused murderer Lindsay Clancy.

Yet, despite the network’s wall-to-wall promotion of Clancy’s exclusive sit-down with new correspondent Ross Douthat, the broadcast only drew an average of 6.77 million total viewers, down 15% in total viewers and 31% in the key demo from the premiere. It was also the third-smallest audience for a ‘60 Minutes’ sophomore episode in the last 25 years.

Still, the network and Weiss sympathizers in the media (some with massive conflicts of interest) tried to quickly spin the episode numbers as a win, noting that Sunday’s broadcast didn’t have a late-afternoon national NFL lead-in. They also pointed out that this year’s second episode had marginally higher ratings than last season’s, which pulled in 6.45 million total viewers.

You can attempt to spin all you want, but the numbers can’t paper over the fact that television viewers just aren’t buying Weiss’s overhauled version of ‘60 Minutes,’ much like they aren’t buying CBS News’s other flagship shows, which have suffered through record-low ratings.

Plus, as CBS News staffers and insiders pointed out to me this week, you don’t fire multiple correspondents and senior leaders from a show just to try to match last season’s ratings. Otherwise, what’s the point of the overhaul?

“If they are okay with 6.7 million for the second episode, then what was the reason for getting rid of Tanya Simon? This is bad,” one network insider said. “They can spin it as much as they want.”