DOJ Probes Five Networks Over Their Joint Walkout

The biggest names in American television walked off the job together. Now the Justice Department wants to know whether that was legal.

The department confirmed on Oct. 10 that it is investigating whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News violated federal antitrust law by suspending their shared White House pool coverage. Its stated basis is the Sherman Act, under which group boycotts among commercial competitors can be illegal. Justice Department officials contacted the networks on Friday and requested communications and documents about the coordinated suspension, according to reports. The New York Times first reported the probe.

How we got here

The networks suspended pooled coverage for several days in September after the White House pulled credentials from reporters at three outlets, including CNN, and the president barred CNN journalists from White House grounds. Shared coverage has since resumed. The Justice Department has not said the networks broke the law, only that it is investigating to find out.

Critics see something else. Bruce Brown of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press called the probe a pretext for seeking the networks' records. Other outlets have described the networks as acting in solidarity with colleagues.

The take

Start with what the networks actually did. Five direct competitors, which fight each other every day for ratings and advertisers, agreed to stop providing the same service at the same time to pressure the government. If five oil companies or five airlines did that, nobody would call it solidarity. They would call it coordination, and they would want to see the emails.

The networks like to say they are businesses when it comes to profits and public trusts when it comes to scrutiny. They cannot have it both ways. The pool is a commercial arrangement among companies that share costs and footage. Asking whether competitors colluded to withhold that footage is a fair question, and the law gives the government the tools to ask it.

There is also a credibility issue. Many Americans have watched these same outlets cover this president with open hostility. A coordinated walkout over access confirms what a lot of viewers already believe: that the national press sees itself as a team, not as a group of independent competitors chasing the truth.

But conservatives should be honest about the risk, too. A federal investigation of news organizations is a powerful weapon, and powerful weapons get passed to the next administration. If a future Democratic Justice Department used antitrust law to demand records from conservative media over a coordinated editorial decision, we would be outraged, and we would be right. The standard set now is the standard that will be used later.

So the test is simple. If the investigation sticks to the business conduct, meaning whether competitors agreed to cut off a shared commercial service, it is legitimate and should go where the evidence leads. If it turns into a fishing expedition for reporters' sources or editorial notes, it will hand the press the martyrdom it wants and lose the public argument the administration wants to win.

The networks made a choice to act as a bloc. They should not be surprised that someone is asking whether that bloc followed the same rules every other industry has to follow.