Cable News Network, Inc., MS NOW Cable, LLC and Politico LLC filed suit against Donald Trump in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on 21 September 2026 (case 1:26-cv-03287), as the court docket shows and the Guardian reported.
Hunch. CNN won this exact argument in 2018, three newsrooms were cut at once, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has already called the ban flatly unconstitutional, so the pressure to file sits above what eight cases on their own would suggest.
The lawsuit market resolves on the federal court docket. YES if, between 19 September and 3 October 2026, a complaint over this ban is filed in a United States federal court and CNN, MS NOW or Politico is itself a named plaintiff, whether alone, together with its own journalists, or alongside other outlets or the White House Correspondents' Association. A complaint brought only in the name of a correspondent, a photographer or an association, with none of the three companies named as a plaintiff, resolves NO, and so does any filing dated after 3 October. Where the docket is not public in time, reports in two of the BBC, the Guardian and Reuters settle it.
We looked for times since 1972 when the US government cut a named news organisation off from access it already had, and asked whether that organisation itself then went to a federal court over it. We found eight. Cases where a single reporter sued over their own pass are left out because they are a different kind of case. There are three of them, and all three went to court.