PETER NAVARRO: Fox, Marx, And The Five Network Cartel Veto 

Something happened inside the White House press corps this week that has exposed how concentrated television news has become. The incident has revealed how a Five Network Cartel with veto power can blatantly suppress news to the American public from the White House and President himself.

Start with the backstory: The White House television “pool” consists of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox — the Five-Network Cartel. They rotate daily to determine which network will provide live coverage of events at the White House, including the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the South Lawn, and other West Wing venues.

When President Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House for their chronically biased coverage and lies, the Five-Network television pool summarily shut down pooled coverage of the President.

Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, serving as the pool’s rotational chairman, announced the action to journalists: “Effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President. This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”

Think about what that meant. CNN was denied its scheduled turn, so Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC did not simply substitute another camera crew and keep reporting. Instead, all five networks agreed that there would be no camera at all. Fox — the one member capable of breaking the appearance of five-network unanimity — chose coordination rather than independence.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins praised Fox for “banding together in solidarity.” The Associated Press likewise used the “S” word in praising the action.

If “solidarity” has a communist ring, there is a reason. Karl Marx himself used it repeatedly. In an 1872 speech, one English translation records Marx declaring: “Let us think of the basic principle of the International: Solidarity.”

But there is an even more delicious historical wrinkle here. When the Trump White House excluded CNN’s Collins herself from an event in 2018, then-Fox News president Jay Wallace issued a statement declaring: “We stand in strong solidarity with CNN for the right to full access for our journalists.”

You can’t make this stuff up. Here we have the blatantly Left CNN making common cause with the putatively Right-Wing Fox.

Now here’s the BIGGER twist in the plot, and the real exposé. There is a corresponding print media pool consisting of over 30 outlets. These range from large players like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and foreign outlets like the Daily Mail, to small players like the Washington Blade and the banned Politico.

And guess what? There is no solidarity among this much larger print media group. Its print media pool has continued without interruption despite the ban of one of its members. That’s the difference between a five-firm oligopoly with a rotating coordinator and a more diffuse and competitive print media with a dispersed 32-member rotation.

Which brings us right back to the back-stabbing Fox News Corporation. Fox should be the odd man out in the Five Network Cartel — studies have shown that ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC all wildly skew their news coverage of President Trump negatively dating all the way back to 2017 and the first Trump term.

In that context, when the TV pool ban was announced, the putatively conservative Fox should have played the cartel-busting maverick in the group — a competitor, in the language of antitrust economics, whose independent behavior has the power to destabilize oligopolistic coordination.

Indeed, if Fox truly were a pro-Trump network embracing not just the RINO tenets of low taxes and reduced regulation but also the tariffs and secure borders of MAGA, it would have played that well-known maverick role. Instead, Fox sealed the presidential censorship deal, sacrificing America’s right to know on the altar of cartel solidarity.

Clearly, Fox is now on an anti-Trump roll — all downhill. After President Trump’s July 16 prime-time address concerning election security, Fox CEO Suzanne Scott ordered shows across Fox Business and Fox News to suppress any discussion of the speech. The morning after, Fox and Friends was up to its usual buffoonery with no hint that the nation had been informed by the president that Communist China has vast capabilities to interfere in our elections.

Suzanne Scott, by the way, is the same executive responsible for the decapitation of three of the network’s most intelligent talk heads — all pro-Trump and pro-MAGA. Lou Dobbs in 2021. Tucker Carlson in 2023. And most recently Maria Bartiromo in 2026.

Meanwhile, useful RINO idiots like Karl Rove, a Trump-hating former George W. Bush strategist, are in ascendancy on the network and have unbridled free rein to dump all over Trump himself and Trump policies atop the RINO hit list like tariffs, tariffs, and tariffs.

The silver lining of all of this? The conservative network Real America’s Voice — home to the MAGA likes of Bannon, Posobiec, Bolling, and Soloman — has stepped up to provide pool coverage. The ultimate lesson may well be that the White House TV pool need not ever be run by an anti-MAGA cartel armed with a five-network veto.

Peter Navarro is the White House Senior Counselor of Trade and Manufacturing and author of Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.