The White House press pool on Monday announced it has suspended its televised coverage of President Donald Trump after the White House pulled CNN from its assigned pool coverage duties this week.

“Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Fox News’ Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, acting chair of the TV pool consortium, said in a note to TV pool members on Monday.

“This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties,” Boughton wrote. “There will be no replacement pool put in place.”

CNN was scheduled to provide TV coverage of Trump this week for the White House pool, including his address to the United Nations General Assembly, but the Trump administration removed the network as its primary pooler after the president banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House.

Boughton on Monday said the other pool coverage, which includes print and radio, would continue as normal. “We will provide updates as this situation develops,” he added.

The White House press pool is a nearly century-old system in which major news networks assign a small group of journalists to travel with the president in an effort to equally distribute the cost and responsibility of coverage. Space is limited aboard Air Force One and at various events the president attends, and such travel is very expensive, so the pool enables all members of the press corps, including local networks across the country and international outlets, to receive a daily record of the presidency.

Monday was supposed to be the start of CNN’s week, but when the White House sent out Trump’s daily press schedule, there was no primary TV pooler listed.

Five networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC — rotate presidential pool coverage. The primary TV pooler also acts as the sole provider of the television and audio stream that the other four news networks rely on in order to broadcast presidential movements to the American public.

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government,” the five White House TV pool networks said in a joint statement Monday. “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

The press pool’s absence was obvious by Monday afternoon. Live coverage of Trump’s remarks at a ribbon-cutting event for his new helicopter pad on the White House South Lawn had no audio. C-SPAN, the nonprofit network that covers public affairs, said it could not broadcast the event without a TV pool feed.

Newsmax host Bianca de la Garza highlighted the lack of audio during the Trump-friendly network’s coverage of the helipad event.

“There is no microphone because the pool cameras aren’t there,” she said as she spoke over an inaudible video feed, adding, “Obviously the ramifications are right here. Can’t hear what the president’s saying.”

Real America’s Voice, a small pro-Trump media organization, was listed on Monday’s White House press schedule as the secondary out-of-town travel pool, a rotation set by the White House. The five major networks are not part of the secondary pool and will not use its video feed.

CNN on Monday was still scheduled to provide TV coverage of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will also be in New York City this week for the U.N. General Assembly. Pool coverage of Cabinet members and the rest of the U.S. government is separate from the presidential pool.

The network’s removal came after Trump on Friday announced he would ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from covering the White House over what he described as their coordinated effort to “purposely tell negative stories” about him and his administration.

Journalists from those outlets were denied entry to the White House on Saturday and had their press credentials confiscated as part of the ban. The news organizations on Monday sued Trump and several top administration officials for blocking their reporters’ access to the White House, alleging that the ban constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump denied that the White House was “instituting an assault on the Free Press,” insisting instead that the “assault” is on the “FAKE NEWS,” which he called a “Cancer” in the U.S. and a “threat to our National Security.” The president gave no examples to back up his claim.

Later Monday, when asked about the press ban following his meeting with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Trump told reporters that he wasn’t worried about a potential press boycott.

“It’s interesting because they said they were going to boycott me, but they never boycott me, so I wasn’t very worried about that,” Trump said.

The Washington Post said it would not publish any photographs of Monday’s presidential events “until midnight Eastern Time” as part of a joint effort with White House photographers in other newsrooms to signal support for the banned networks.

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