Symone Sanders-Townsend dealt with White House reporters for years as Vice President Kamala Harris’s chief spokesperson. So having some coverage, some of which she maybe would think unfair, is nothing new.
“There were definitely times where I’m like, ‘Oh, so and so is in the pool today. It’s gonna be a little more difficult,’” the MS NOW host told Fortune. “But it never crossed my mind that I could say I don’t want them here.”
President Donald Trump had no such hesitation. On Sept. 18, he announced that he would be banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, after accusing them of reporting “FICTION and LIES.” On Monday morning, the outlets sued, and hours later, Trump defended the ban at a press conference with Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered their access restored for 14 days, finding the ban was likely unconstitutional. But mere hours later, MS NOW’s Laura Barrón-López and two CNN journalists were turned away from the arrival ceremony for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state dinner.
“There is a difference between rights on paper and rights in practice,” Sanders-Townsend said, referencing examples like the constitutional amendments that came after the Civil War to protect Black Americans. “We cannot allow that right to become a right on paper and not a right in practice.”
“This is a White House and this is an administration where retribution is actually a feature, not a bug,” she said. “The president literally ran on ‘I will be your retribution.’”
She said the real concern is the midterms. “It’s not lost on me that it’s happening less than 40 days before Election Day,” she said. Most voters, she noted, learn results from news outlets, not county election websites. “If this president can convince a large swath of Americans that the news organizations cannot independently be trusted to tell them the truth, well, then he can claim that these organizations calling the election are actually lies.”
Covering the White House, as it is, is a small niche in an even smaller field of journalism. Reporters know each other, share notes, and remember each others’ kids’ birthdays. So when the White House blocked CNN from its turn in the rotating TV pool, the banned outlets didn’t stand alone: ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC refused to fill in, saying in a rare joint statement that “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
Nearly 50 news organizations signed a friend-of-the-court brief, compiled by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, urging the ban to be lifted. In the meantime, the New York Times and the Washington Post said they would hold off on running pool photos. Fox News stood with CNN in 2018, too, after the White House barred CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from an event.
Sanders-Townsend praised rival outlets for backing the three banned networks. “For the entities and individuals that have fought when their rights have been trampled on, by and large they’ve won,” she said. “It’s the organizations that just decide to roll over and settle that are the cautionary tales.”
She referenced the president’s affinity for the media. On Monday, at the joint presser the president held with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the president said the relationship is a two-way street, because media would never “boycott” him. “In one breath, he will lambaste the media and literally drag the media apparatus through the mud,” she said. “But in another breath, he cares very much so about the coverage. He watches MS NOW. The people at the White House watch our network.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ban lands as MS NOW builds a business of its own. The network split from NBC News last year when Comcast spun off its cable channels into Versant. On Sept. 9, it launched a paid membership app. The president said the spin-off was to protect against a dying business, but the company says it has logged 150 million podcast downloads alone this year.
‘I don’t live by the comments’
One of those podcasts is Clock It, which Sanders-Townsend co-hosts with former White House correspondent Eugene Daniels. On Sept. 16, streamer Hasan Piker made his first MS NOW appearance on the show, and the two had an exchange that went viral. “If I was a strategist or a consultant or the political director on one of these campaigns, I would absolutely be telling my people to disavow you,” she told him on the podcast. In response, Piker argued his views are closer to the majority than the national Democratic Party’s.
Piker, who has 3.1 million Twitch followers, has campaigned with Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, who called Piker’s past remark that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks “a dumb statement” but has kept appearing with him.
Sanders-Townsend told Fortune she and Daniels booked Piker to talk to him rather than about him. She agreed with his view that Republicans use him to avoid the issues he raises. “They just want to talk about him, and I think he’s correct about that,” she said.
But she said candidates still need to think about messaging when it’s a streamer with a high profile. “It’s one thing when you are going to someone on their platform because you want the access and the audience that they have done the work of building up,” she said. “But when the creators or the streamers step out of their element and then they step onto a stage next to a candidate, I do think that the stakes change.”
The interview drew criticism from the right and the left, with many questioning why she invited him in the first place. “Did we read the comments? Yeah, but I don’t live by the comments, so the comments aren’t going to kill me,” she said.
She said the online debate misses a step: the actual steps behind policy debate. “There’s a lot of conversation about policies, but not enough conversation about the politics that it takes to make the policies a reality.”
