All Together Now

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2026

All Together Now

Agree on something all require, then defend it together.

When discussing the first principles of government in 1795, Thomas Paine said, “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression…” It’s a great sentiment, but not often put into action. Yet over the past two weeks, we’ve seen it tested in an unlikely setting: the press.

On September 18, citing “fake news” and negative stories, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House grounds. To many, this seemed like a continuation of what The New York Times described as his “ever-expanding battles with the news media.” Three days afterward, the White House also removed CNN from its rotation for TV pool duties. That same day, the three banned news outlets sued the Trump Administration, citing violations of their First Amendment rights.

What sets this moment apart is what the other networks did within hours of the CNN ban. ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC suspended presidential pool coverage instead of replacing CNN within it. They accepted a major disruption to their work over the exclusion of a competitor.

Bryan Boughton, the pool’s current chairman and Fox News’s Washington bureau chief, indicated that coverage of the vice president and Congress would continue. In a rare Joint Network Statement issued by leadership of the five major networks, they defended the public’s access to independent information and said, “No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.

JOINT NETWORK STATEMENT, SEPTEMBER 2026

Dating back decades, the presidential press pool includes the five networks. They take turns filming the president, and in doing so, split costs and distribute footage worldwide, including settings where the entire press corps would not fit. This arrangement serves the networks, but equally the public, and the president who wants to be seen.

The pool is a logistical cooperative among otherwise fierce business competitors with widely differing editorial leanings and styles. Describing them as enemies may take Mr. Paine a bit too far, but no one would mistake Fox News and CNN for friends.

And yet, Fox and the others agreed that a competitor’s exclusion was their problem, too. Or could be. Other journalists covered Trump, and official video was available, but the networks interrupted the system all five depend on. They formed a united front and created an unprecedented television blackout of the president.

It’s important to pay attention to this for more than the rarity of the action and the obvious frustrations it might have caused the president. In a country so doubtful about its ability to come together, the press's actions offer an answer at a time when many Americans can’t quite see one.

In 2024, a Gallup survey determined that 80% of Americans said the country was greatly divided on its most important values (only 18% saw a united America). In early 2026, a Pew Research Center survey found that 66% expected America to be even more politically divided by 2050. Those are perceptions and expectations - not indisputable facts. But they do tell us something about the future many Americans imagine.

If we hold back on cooperation until we are in full agreement, that vision of America’s future remains as bleak as the figures in the two surveys. But the broadcast networks, in their unity, offered us a far more manageable starting line: agree on something all require, then defend it together. In this instance, they decided their usual editorial disagreements could wait.

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2020

Britain also had a moment like this, and it’s a useful illustration. In February of 2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his advisors excluded some news organizations from a briefing on future trade deals. Those prevented from attending included the Press Association, The Independent, and the Mirror. The journalists who had been included walked out of the session in solidarity with their excluded colleagues.

While the government argued that the session had been a restricted session, and a broader briefing had been open to accredited journalists, the journalists objected. They gave up the advantages of remaining, because they recognized what Paine had also recognized, centuries earlier: permitting another’s oppression establishes a precedent that may eventually reach you. Any government’s favor offers unreliable protection if that same government can change its favorites.

Naturally, the current administration does not say “favorites.” It cites “national security” and protecting the public from falsehoods as the background causes for the bans. On September 27, Attorney General Todd Blanche said that inaccuracies in coverage could damage relationships with foreign partners. On the other side, Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker that the White House scrambled to “retrofit a rationale” for the abrupt press ban.

It goes without saying that news organizations must answer for errors, but scrutiny must never be intentionally mislabeled as errors or falsehoods. Enabling the people news organizations cover to punish reporting they dislike is the end of accountability. But as in Britain in 2020, trying to avoid scrutiny may only bring the government into even sharper focus.

Between September 24th and 28th, the expected “back and forth” played out, and remains unresolved. A U.S. District judge ordered the credentials to be restored for 14 days, saying due process had been denied and inadequate notice given. On the 25th, CNN was allowed to film a presidential event, but blocked from its pool assignment the next day. By the 27th, the pool was preparing to resume rotations, indicating that CNN would be replaced on a case-by-case basis.

So, it was a limited act of unity and cooperation, and practical pressures tested its boundaries almost immediately. The point is not to paint news organizations as selfless or self-interest as inherently wrong. We must acknowledge that protecting their own ability to work gives them a reason to protect their rivals’, as well. Thomas Paine would have supported their logic.

So too would feminist writer Audre Lorde, who remarked in 1979 that community does not require sameness. She said, “community must not mean shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

The press pool has just demonstrated this while giving us a brief civics lesson: Defending someone else’s rights helps protect your own, and people can cooperate to preserve those rights without settling other disagreements.

And there’s one final bit of hope in the Pew findings. They noted that the share of people expecting a less divided country by 2050 rose from 21% (in 2023) to 33% (in 2026). Will the press pool’s action produce lasting change? It remains in question, but what is not in question is that the networks didn’t hesitate to defend one another. For a nation concerned about whether it can come together, there has been something very hopeful in watching an unusual group of people decide it was worth trying.

Faithfully,