DOJ Tells Networks They Can’t All Look at Trump the Same Way

WASHINGTON—PARODY. The Justice Department has informed America’s major television networks that if they intend to cover President Trump, they must first establish that their coverage offers consumers a meaningfully different Trump experience.

The new guidance, drafted after the department began examining whether a temporary collective halt in White House pool coverage amounted to an illegal boycott, prohibits ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC from displaying the president in ways that could lead viewers to believe they are receiving interchangeable products.

“Five companies pointing cameras at the same man, from roughly the same direction, while he says roughly the same thing is exactly the sort of market uniformity that alarms us,” said a fictional antitrust official, gesturing at a PowerPoint slide titled Is This Competition, Or Just Everyone Watching? “The American viewer deserves choice. One network can offer Trump as a statesman. Another can offer Trump as a weather event. But no cartelizing around basic visibility.”

Under the proposed remedy, Fox News would retain the “Command Performance” package, featuring low angles, ceremonial arrivals and an optional eagle in the distance. CNN would be required to offer “The Developing Situation,” in which every presidential movement is accompanied by a legal analyst standing beside a touchscreen map of consequences. NBC would carry “Trump After Dark,” a prestige presentation in which the lights dim whenever a sentence begins with “Nobody has ever.”

CBS, which initially asked whether it could simply cover the president normally, was told normality had not been recognized as a defensible market category since at least 2016.

The arrangement rapidly created complications. During one appearance, five camera crews were required to maintain visual independence while following the same president through the same doorway. Fox was instructed not to film Trump entering. CNN was instructed to film the doorway’s constitutional implications. ABC was assigned a human-interest segment about the doorway’s journey. NBC was told to wait until the doorway had accumulated enough emotional backstory to earn a limited series.

By the time the president reached the lectern, the pool had successfully become so competitive that none of the networks possessed usable footage of the event.

That outcome was initially celebrated inside the White House as proof the administration had restored choice. It became less popular when staff members realized they could no longer review what Trump had said without subscribing to five separate streaming services and entering a promotional code distributed by the Justice Department.

The emergency fell to incoming press secretary Katie Zacharia, who was reportedly asked to oversee a new White House initiative called the Presidential Content Marketplace. In the fictional program, reporters seeking access must select from several coverage lanes: “admiring,” “skeptical,” “atmospheric,” “legally adjacent,” and “whatever is happening with the stock footage of Air Force One.”

Zacharia’s first briefing became a demonstration of the new competition policy. Reporters were seated according to their network’s assigned emotional genre. A Fox correspondent stood on a riser marked “momentum.” A CNN correspondent was positioned beside an emergency exit marked “context.” The pooled camera was removed entirely after a Justice Department lawyer warned that its very name suggested socialism with a tripod.

Then came the reveal nobody had anticipated: Trump, accustomed to a single press pool creating a unified visual record of his day, objected that the competing networks had made him look five different ways at once.

“One made me look too serious, one made me look not serious enough, one made me look like I was under investigation, and one was apparently an eight-part documentary about my hand,” the fictional president said, before demanding an immediate federal investigation into why the free market had produced criticism in multiple resolutions.

Justice officials said they were evaluating the complaint, but cautioned that it could take time to determine whether Trump’s face had unlawfully cornered the market on Trump.