Conspiracy
White House Uses Obama As Character Reference While Banning CNN
By Tah Foil, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. The Trump administration confirmed this week that CNN, Politico, and MSNBC have been removed from the White House press pool, a decision officials described as routine, precedented, and frankly overdue, depending on which official you asked and how recently they had seen their own cable coverage.
The official position, as stated by press secretary Karoline Leavitt at Tuesday's briefing, is that the move falls within a long tradition of presidential press management, citing specifically the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden as historical companions in the practice.
FactCheck.org then did what it does, which is read things, and found that Obama restricted Fox News's access to a single Treasury Department interview in 2009 before the White House press corps pushed back and the administration reversed course within the week. Biden, for his part, limited some press conference formats and was famously reluctant to take questions from reporters who were standing in the same room as him, which is a different category of avoidance.
Neither president removed outlets from the pool entirely. This detail was included in the FactCheck report under the heading "Key Finding," which is the journalistic equivalent of underlining something twice and sliding it across the table.
Stephen Miller, serving as a senior White House adviser, told reporters Wednesday that the comparison to Obama was "entirely appropriate" and that anyone suggesting otherwise was "weaponizing context." He did not elaborate on how context becomes a weapon or who approved its deployment, but said a statement would be forthcoming.
The statement has not arrived as of press time.
CNN's chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper said in a brief on-air segment that the network would continue reporting from outside the White House complex using what he described as "the same methods we use everywhere else, including the ones that work better anyway." He did not explain what those methods were. The segment ran for four minutes.
Politico issued a written statement noting that its reporters had already filed three stories about the ban before learning they were banned, which the outlet described as a workflow issue it was actively reviewing.
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow addressed the situation on Monday evening in a seventeen-minute opening segment that began with the Salem witch trials and arrived at the press pool ban somewhere around the third commercial break. The segment was later clipped to forty-five seconds and performed significantly better.
The administration's legal team has indicated the bans are consistent with executive authority over White House access, a position several First Amendment scholars described as "defensible in a narrow technical sense" and "the kind of thing you say when the broader argument isn't going well."
At least two of those scholars noted that citing Obama as precedent for a policy Obama abandoned under peer pressure in 2009 is, legally speaking, citing the failure of the policy as the policy.
A spokesperson for former President Obama did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for former President Biden responded with a statement that read, in full, "President Biden believes strongly in a free and independent press," followed by a paragraph about his record on transparency that the spokesperson asked not be quoted directly.
The White House has not indicated whether additional outlets face removal. A senior official, speaking on background, said the pool would be evaluated on an ongoing basis using criteria that were, quote, "clear to the people who need to know them."
Obama could not be reached because nobody tried.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.factcheck.org/2026/09/trumps-ban-of-news-organizations-goes-beyond-obama-biden-actions/