President Trump has been battling with The Associated Press over his decree that the body of water between Florida and Mexico be identified as the Gulf of America. This may look like no more than a classic Washington quarrel, long a characteristic of the press and the presidency, that has reached an extreme level over semantics. It’s much bigger than that, and the implications are far-reaching
I say that as a former longtime White House reporter. I began my stint there covering Jimmy Carter for The A.P. As its senior White House correspondent during most of Ronald Reagan’s first term, I was in and out of the Oval Office almost daily and regularly traveled aboard Air Force One. Later, as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, I covered the White House during Mr. Reagan’s second term and the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
This far from conventional dispute erupted nearly two weeks ago when an A.P. reporter was barred from an Oval Office event because his news organization had continued to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its longstanding name. Three days later, a White House official said the administration would bar A.P. reporters from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, though they would retain credentials to the White House complex. Mr. Trump weighed in on Tuesday, saying, “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America.”
Dozens of major news organizations, including The New York Times and the conservative outlets Fox News and Newsmax, called on the White House on Monday to lift its ban on The A.P., to no avail. On Friday, The A.P. sued top White House officials, accusing them of violating the First and Fifth Amendments by denying its reporters access.
The attack on the news agency brings into focus the administration’s refusal to respect the First Amendment, with presidential aides and the president himself trying to dictate the very language news reporters may use — just as George Orwell’s fictional dictators did. It is emblematic of the broader assault by the White House on the public’s right to know. In the administration’s opening weeks, Brendan Carr, Mr. Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has ordered his agency to investigate ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and NPR. The Defense Department has thrown such mainstream media outlets as The New York Times, NBC News and NPR out of their work spaces in the Pentagon and moved in some conservative outlets.
The pressure has begun to take on the outlines of chilling history. Dictators and other authoritarian leaders have long sought to control the critical role the mass media plays in shaping public discourse.
From that perspective, there’s no better target for the White House than The A.P., one of the largest global news organizations. It dispatches news stories and photographs to newspapers, broadcasters and websites around the world, with no political ax nor slant.
Since its beginning in 1846, The A.P. has maintained rigorous standards of fairness and reporting based on facts, seeking to keep any bias or political agenda out of its articles. It carefully explained that it would use “Gulf of Mexico,” as it has been known for more than 400 years, in its reports — while also noting in its stories that Mr. Trump was using “Gulf of America” — because his decision to change the name carried authority only in the United States, and the agency serves news outlets and readers around the world. The A.P. said it would update this guidance in its influential stylebook, a writing and editing reference widely used in newsrooms worldwide.
(Mr. Trump also ordered that the mountain in Alaska designated as Denali by President Barack Obama be renamed Mount McKinley. The A.P. accepted that change because the peak is entirely within U.S. territory and, it said, within the president’s authority to change the name.)
The impact of the attack on the news agency is potentially huge, influencing far more than how a body of water will be identified. If successful, the result could shape language used throughout the news media.
“This is about A.P. weaponizing language through their stylebook to push a partisan worldview in contrast with the traditional and deeply held beliefs of many Americans and many people around the world,” a White House deputy chief of staff, Taylor Budowich, told Axios.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Feb. 12 that “it is a privilege to cover this White House” and 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 is given.”
“If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room,” she said at a White House press briefing, “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.”
Yes, it is a privilege to cover the White House. It is also a privilege to live there and serve as president. That privilege comes with an obligation to honor the Constitution.
Certainly, some stories written by A.P. reporters — and most others covering the White House — have irked presidents and their staffs. The often raw relationship between reporters and presidents is not new. As the Watergate scandal was destroying his presidency, Richard Nixon ordered illegal wiretaps on journalists’ phones and feuded throughout the scandal with The Washington Post. The Obama administration subjected reporters to invasive investigations of leaks. And in Mr. Trump’s first term, the White House temporarily revoked the press badge of CNN’s Jim Acosta.
But, said Mark Weinberg, who worked in the White House press office for all eight years of the Reagan administration and then served the retired president as his spokesman for two years, “it would never have occurred to us to exclude The A.P. or any organization, for that matter, but especially not a wire service. They and United Press International were the foundation of coverage in the Reagan White House. They were never not there.”
“More broadly,” he told me, “we would never have excluded any legitimate news-gathering organization because we did not like or agree with their coverage. That seems un-American. Besides, Reagan himself would not have tolerated that.”
In his history of the relationship between the press and the president, the historian Harold Holzer wrote in 2020 that a “fundamental tension dates to the founding era.” But, he added, Mr. Trump, in his first term, “managed to escalate it into an outright, unrelenting war against the media and the truth itself,” causing “inestimable, but hopefully not permanent, damage.”
We’ll see. Any one of the administration’s attacks on independent journalism represents a threat to American democracy. Punishing the truth tellers enables liars. History has shown repeatedly that restricting a free press is a precursor to very bad things.
The post I’ve Seen Presidents Clash With the Press. This Is Different. appeared first on New York Times.
