White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is encouraging his Trump administration colleagues not to appear on Fox News after the cable news channel agreed to be part of the TV pool boycott this week to support three news outlets banned from the executive mansion complex.
In an op-ed published on Wednesday, which Navarro then amplified on social media, the trade adviser implored “Cabinet secretaries, agency heads, White House officials and surrogates” to “stay off Fox News and Fox Business.”
“The only booking Fox should make is a primetime apology to President Trump and the MAGA audience it has spent years courting,” he wrote on X. “Fox no longer has a monopoly on conservative media. It’s time the little guys got a share of the pie.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment, made on the same day that the banned news outlets, CNN, MS Now, and Politico, were in federal court in Washington, D.C., asking Judge Timothy Kelly to grant them a temporary restraining order against the ban on First Amendment and due process grounds.
President Donald Trump has defended the ban on social media on national security grounds, as the Justice Department in legal documents has reiterated that reporting on the administration at the White House is a “privilege.”
Fox News has had a complicated relationship with Trump and his administrations, past and present. The most notable example is from Election Night in 2020, when the president, Jared Kushner, and other campaign aides tried to pressure the news channel, including then-Fox News Executive Chair Rupert Murdoch, into reversing its decision that former President Joe Biden won the state of Arizona.
Fox News announced on Monday that it, along with ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, would not participate in the TV pool, at least for Trump’s trip this week to New York City for his address to the U.N. General Assembly.
In response, the White House has sought to work around the TV pool by relying on a so-called secondary TV pool, in addition to its own TV channel, social media platforms, and even a text messaging service.
For political analyst Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania who has researched conservative media organizations, Fox News’s decision not to be part of the TV pool “signifies both the positions of Fox’s journalists and managers.”
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“Realistically, I think Fox’s managers understand that if this is allowable, then Democratic administrations will throw them out,” Rosenwald told the Washington Examiner. “So some of it is principled, and some is pragmatic. I also think it’s too esoteric or insider-baseball-y for their viewers to care in a negative way. Most viewers probably don’t know what the WH pool is.”