The White House launched Trump TV on Monday, a 24/7 video stream available on YouTube and the White House official app, days after President Donald Trump banned reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House press pool.
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Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday there was no specific reason for the timing of his ban, but that it was because he was “sick” of the “cumulative stories [from] over the last two years.” He also insisted in a Truth Social post on Monday this was “not an assault on free press.”
Critics see it differently, and many are questioning whether the combination of a government-branded news stream and a shrinking independent press pool could amount to state-run media, in which news outlets operate under a government’s financial and editorial control.
When asked about Trump TV, the White House directed HuffPost to Kaelan Dorr, the White House head of digital strategy, who posted on X: “Trump TV is a 24/7 livestream of the Administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered,” adding that press coverage has been inaccurate or nonexistent when it comes to the Trump administration’s accomplishments.
The stream itself appeared to tell a different story. As of Tuesday afternoon, the White House YouTube channel’s Trump TV stream rebroadcast Trump’s morning with the UN and him signing the U.S.-Denmark-Greenland deal. A running-time counter said the stream had been live for 18 hours and had fewer than 2,000 people watching. A bar on the screen also asked viewers to text “POTUS” to 45470 for White House updates, which then required the individual to fill out their personal information.
Dorr did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment about whether Trump TV was connected to the reduction in independent press access and whether Trump TV would include content from other outlets or be exclusively administration-produced.
The White House Correspondents’ Association also did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment as of publication. Former WHCA President Weijia Jiang slammed the initial press ban in a Fox News interview on Sunday.
“America cannot have state TV,” she said. “This is a serious concern for the public, because an attack on one outlet is an attack on everyone … It is limiting the amount of information that reporters inside can gather, can excavate, to give back to the public.”
Jennifer McCoy, a democracy expert and Professor Emerita at Georgia State University, told HuffPost the public shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this situation is yielding to state-run media, but did say the warning signs are there.
“The biggest early warning signs are the restrictions and harassment of press we have seen so far,” McCoy said. “First, the exclusion of AP, and now these three from the White House pool, reportedly frivolous lawsuits against media organizations, and enabling friends and allies to buy up media and entertainment in consolidation of influence.”
There are two factors to consider with the ban and Trump TV before believing this is fully turning into state-run media, McCoy said.
“Is this a business venture like Truth Social, in which the president has a financial gain?” McCoy asked. “Is it official communications and speeches, or is it the propaganda videos that DHS was disseminating on social media and the fake videos that the president disseminates on Truth Social?”
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It is unclear whether Trump TV will show advertisements or generate its own revenue, both of which Truth Social does.
McCoy pointed to Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, both of whom built out state media operations that promoted government achievements while blocking any critical coverage and threatening independent journalists.
“This direct line of communication is a common tactic of populist leaders to strengthen a personal relationship and loyalty among supporters,” McCoy said. “They often claim it is because the press is biased against them, but it often leads into a common maneuver of the authoritarian playbook — control of the media space to eliminate an important source of societal accountability and to manipulate voters.”
Experts do not think the administration can operate a single state-owned media — not with U.S. free speech protections.
Still, McCoy doesn’t expect the U.S. to end up with a single dominant state media outlet like Venezuela and Ecuador did.
“The U.S. still has extraordinarily strong free speech protections, compared with many other countries, in the First Amendment and a strong judiciary,” she said.
CNN, Politico and MS NOW filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday “to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” the organizations wrote in a joint statement.
However, even with free speech protections, there is still some cause for concern, Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, told HuffPost.
“This just makes it even clearer that the real goal here is to ensure that the American public is fed a steady diet of government propaganda, either from the government itself (through this app and similar channels) or from a press pool that has been stripped of independence,” Jaffer said.
McCoy laid out the broader factors she sees at play: Loyalists being placed in oversight agencies like the FCC, funding cuts to public broadcasting and outlets recruited to help publicize the administration’s message.
“All [these] help to weaken accountability mechanisms in an age of extreme political polarization,” McCoy said.
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