White House complains when networks stop airing Trump speech before it ends

At least one senior official is among those who complained

Mr Trump delivering his speech in Ohio (AP)

The White House has complained after three top cable networks cut away from a speech being delivered by President Donald Trump in Ohio.

The networks cut away from the speech after Mr Trump began to discuss topics other than his planned remarks on infrastructure.

CNN and MSNBC had switched away from Mr Trump's speech within 30 minutes of its start before they cut away to other news and some analysis. They were followed by Fox News about 10 minutes later, according to users on social media.

Fox Business covered Mr Trump's entire speech.

The decision to cut the speech off by the networks was criticised by some in the White House, including a senior member of the staff.

That includes special assistant to the president Steven Cheung, who tweeted a screenshot of the networks side-by-side.

"So @realDonaldTrump is giving an important speech to the American people. Guess who is refusing to take the entire speech live..." Mr Cheung wrote on Twitter.

News networks received a lot of criticism for their approach to covering Mr Trump during the 2016 election.

At that time, the networks regularly aired his speeches in their entirety — and critics said that the networks boosted Mr Trump's campaign with massive amounts of air time.

The networks gave Mr Trump so much air time that the CNN Presient Jeff Zucker later admitted that his company may have made a mistake by giving Mr Trump so much air time early on in his campaign.