This is a perfectly fine hill for the AP to die on
The wire service’s reporters have been barred from White House events. Next time, it could be you.
The world is now filled with media critics, media analysts, media prognosticators, media experts, media everything. Not one of them foresaw, or could have foreseen, that the first major Trump-media clash would center on a cartographic issue involving the Associated Press and whether journalists must now call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
Predictability is overrated anyway.
The spat relates to perhaps the most trolling executive order issued by President Donald Trump, in which he put pen to paper on the “Gulf of America.” His rationale: “The area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America.” The AP, a world leader in English style and usage, decided not to change its guidance on the matter, citing the facts that the United States and Mexico share gulf borders and that the body of water has maintained its name for more than 400 years.
Get in line, AP! According to a letter from AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday warned of access restrictions if the wire service “did not immediately align its editorial standards” with the gulf-name mandate. The AP held firm, and the White House then blocked a reporter from an Oval Office event and later blocked another reporter from an event in the Diplomatic Room, according to the letter.
The blocking of AP access continued throughout the week, including events at the White House on Thursday and a presidential trip on Friday. A White House official on Friday tweeted that the wire service’s “privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” would go to “the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.” The AP has been a member of the 13-person presidential press pool for more than a century.
How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter — CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.
With that, the president’s spokesperson in Orwellian fashion recategorized an editorial judgment as an assertion of fact. Reporters in attendance moved on to other topics, including Ukraine, hostage releases, information about assassination attempts on Trump’s life, obstruction of the president’s agenda, New York City’s FEMA funding and so on. Absurdity is a relative and elastic phenomenon: Just as no one would have supposed even a short time ago that a wire service would be sidelined over compliance with “Gulf of America,” how far off is the day when outlets must heed the renaming of the White House to “the Trump Mansion”?
Just like other legacy media outlets, the AP is a steady target for conservative media critics. Roger Ailes, the late chief of Fox News, blasted the wire service in a 2012 visit to his alma mater, Ohio University. “It tips left all the time now,” Ailes said. Newsbusters, a site that watchdogs mainstream outlets, has a deep archive of AP criticism, an oeuvre that has skewered the wire service as “Associated Partisans.” And yet, there was former Trump attorney general William P. Barr on Feb. 7 feting the AP’s Mike Balsamo — who was inaugurated as president of the National Press Club — as exemplifying the “values that are essential ... if our news organizations are going to play the indispensable role that they play in a democratic republic.”
Several organizations have issued statements deploring the White House’s actions, including the White House Correspondents’ Association, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and PEN America. The New York Times has backed the AP in “objecting to governmental retribution for editorial decisions that the government disagrees with.” And a Post spokesperson said the AP’s access is “central for all journalistic organizations, including The Washington Post, in serving millions of Americans with fact-based, independent journalism each day.”
The moment represents a degradation of the circumstances around White House access spats. When the Obama White House in 2009 got into an access spat with Fox News, they were essentially fighting over months of vitriolic coverage by the network. And when the first Trump White House in 2018 revoked the credentials of White House correspondent Jim Acosta, they were beefing over Acosta’s demeanor and coverage. Now it’s a thing about three words on a Rand McNally map marking a body of water that figures little in American mythology.
In the press briefing, Leavitt said that “nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions. That’s an invitation that’s given. ... We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office.” All true, with an important caveat. The White House violates the First Amendment if it retaliates against media outlets because it doesn’t like their reporting, opinions, etc. — a no-no known in the legal field as viewpoint discrimination. That very doctrine was at the core of the 2018 lawsuit by CNN protesting the revocation of Acosta’s hard pass to the White House complex. “There can be no question that the revocation of Acosta’s credentials is a content- and viewpoint-based punishment imposed on him because the President and his administration do not like CNN or Acosta’s reporting,” lawyers wrote for CNN in a successful court challenge to the revocation.
It’s possible, accordingly, that there will be legal consequences for the White House if the AP decides to pursue courthouse remedies. Maybe not political consequences, however. Consider that Leavitt was able to slide out of her press briefing without taking any heat for her gobsmacking embrace of thought control. Elizabeth Moore, a spokeswoman for Breitbart, said this about the affair: “Have you asked the AP why they refuse to call the Gulf of America by its rightful name? Why choose to stand on ceremony on something like this? Especially if it means they’re going to reduce their access to the White House.”
Dylan Housman, editor in chief of the Daily Caller, passed along this statement: “Having showed up to Karine Jean-Pierre’s press briefings for a year straight, only for us to get called on a whopping 3 total times in that span despite being permanent members of the WHCA, I won’t be crying crocodile tears for any corporate media covering this White House. That being said, when there are far more egregious abuses being committed by the corporate press constantly, ‘Gulf of America’ vs. ‘Gulf of Mexico’ is a weird hill to die on. I don’t like the precedent of the White House trying to influence journalist’s terminology at the granular level this way.”
And there’s a constituency of folks expressing wonder at AP’s topographical choices:
On this particular hill, we have the freedom to make editorial choices without government intervention and manipulation. It’s a fine hill to die on.