President Donald Trump has made two restrictions on the free press since taking office two months ago and both are unprecedented in modern times and strike at the backbone of the fourth estate.
First, Trump banned the Associated Press from White House briefings and Air Force One.
Then he gave his hand-selected press team exclusive authority to decide who gets access to cover the president up-close at news briefings, at public events and during travel both domestic and abroad.
Combined the two decisions put at risk the most powerful check on the executive branch’s actions — public scrutiny — and open the gate for future presidents to surround their activities with sycophants disguised as journalists who issue forth nothing more than state-sponsored reports for the American people.
The Associated Press is an organization that for nearly 180 years has served this country with the facts and detailed reporting our republic needs to have an informed electorate.
The AP is not just a single newspaper. Rather it supplies subscribing newspapers and websites around the world with content that a single organization could never collect on its own. The AP has been at the crux of history for almost two centuries.
An Associated Press correspondent was at the small farmhouse in Virginia when Robert E. Lee surrendered, ready to send a dispatch to member newspapers with the news that the Civil War had finally ended.
The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington is based on the photo captured by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal who was in the middle of the bloodiest battle for the Pacific islands.
Nick Ut’s photo of Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack on her Vietnamese village brought the horrors of the war to American’s living rooms.
Reporters and photographers from the Associated Press were traveling with the presidents and captured for America the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.
It was AP photographer Evan Vucci who captured the photo of President Donald Trump with blood streaming down his face, fist raised in defiance and Secret Service members surrounding him to protect him from a would-be assassin shooting from a nearby building.
AP reporters also keep an eye on our elected officials at the federal, state and local levels. They capture crime and tragedies, joyful celebrations and political protests.
What could have possibly prompted the president to be the first man to restrict their access to the White House and American’s access to critical information about the executive branch?
The Associated Press decided to continue calling the body of water along our southern shores the Gulf of Mexico, while acknowledging that Trump had recently signed an executive order to change the name to the Gulf of America.
The White House made it abundantly clear that banning the AP was not content neutral and was in fact retaliatory based on the AP’s speech. A Monday morning press release said: “We stand by our decision to hold the Fake News accountable for their lies.”
It is unclear what “lie” the Associated Press told about the international body of water that has been known as the Gulf of Mexico for about 400 years, but one thing is clear: Trump is using his power to chill free speech and undermine the free press, both of which are protected from government retribution by the U.S. Bill of Rights and the cornerstone of America’s republic.
The Associated Press is not perfect. It is made up of reporters, editors, photographers and staff who do their best to quickly get information out that is accurate. Mistakes have been made, and corrections issued over the years, but Trump has selected one of the least partisan news outlets in America to target.
When other papers decided not to publish any news stories about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop heeding warnings that the damning contents were fake, the Associated Press reported on the issue in an honest and transparent way. The AP did not have access to the laptop but repeated what the New York Post had found. The story quoted the director of national intelligence that there was no intelligence to support that the laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
The AP described the emails between Hunter Biden and the Russian oligarchs who paid him millions to be on their board as “consequential,” especially because one thanked Hunter for inviting him to Washington to meet his father.
Historically, access to the White House, Air Force One and daily events with the president are rotated among journalists who are members of the White House Correspondents Association. The reporters are known as the “pool,” and their detailed minute-by-minute reports of the president’s public meetings, events, travels and press conferences are available to anyone on the White House’s website and can be republished for free. Past presidents have used the system precisely to avoid even the appearance of retaliation or favoritism toward America’s free press.
Not satisfied with his ban on the Associated Press, Trump announced he was revoking the association’s control over the pool and he gave his hand-selected press team exclusive authority to decide who gets access to cover the president up-close at news briefings, at public events and during travel both domestic and abroad.
Unfortunately, both decisions were made in direct response to speech Trump did not like, rather than for legitimate reasons like perceived threats to national security, or belligerent behavior.
To put these actions into perspective consider this: When President Bill Clinton spoke at the 1998 White House Correspondents dinner, Matt Drudge, who broke the Monica Lewinsky story, was there with the “mainstream media” basking in the glory of his scoop. It was the ultimate “flex” by America’s free press that Drudge attended the event. The non-traditional journalist might have been from outside the Beltway, but Drudge was a journalist who had held Clinton accountable.
Even during the height of the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon didn’t kick the Washington Post out of the pool.
Fox News covered President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline relentlessly (an area of coverage the AP largely missed), and yet they remained in the pool.
Personally, I don’t care what we call the gulf: Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, the Gulf of Panama.
I do care that the Associated Press considered the president’s executive order and decided that because it has member news organizations in Mexico, and across Central and South America who pay for their content, as well as reporters based across the Southern Hemisphere, it would stick with the historic naming convention for bodies of water. The AP did change its style in accordance with the president’s order to call the tallest peak in North America Mount McKinley instead of Denali.
“As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences,” the Associated Press wrote, explaining that it uses both the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez to describe the body of water so that readers in Mexico understand the reference.
I also care deeply that the president is setting a precedent that news organizations who don’t comply with his orders will be denied access to the White House.
What happens when the White House gets to pick the reporters who participate in the pool and access becomes conditional on positive news coverage? Can the facts coming from the White House be trusted if reporters fear losing access over coverage a president doesn’t like or want? That is precisely why, for decades, no president has controlled the press access to the White House pool. Freedom of the press to be critical and honest even in the face of pressure from the president is too important.
Most of the pool reports are boring hour-by-hour briefs of the president’s activities. From the pool report on Feb. 25 at 4:20 p.m. we learned: “Trump confirmed that he has spoken with House Republicans who have said they won’t support the budget resolution, but didn’t name names.”
I’ve been in a presidential pool once. President Barack Obama was in Colorado Springs for the Air Force Academy. Local reporters are often granted access to travel with pool reporters to cover events with the president, and my editor had arranged with the White House for me to have a brief 5-minute interview with the president.
My interview focused on questions about Obama’s failed efforts to fix the Veterans Administration so that the cadets graduating that day would someday get the good health care they deserved. No one restricted my questions or controlled the conversation. Nearly two decades later, troubling problems persist at the VA.
The about changes to the VA barely got noticed, but it felt good to ask tough questions of the U.S. president about something that mattered deeply to my friends, neighbors and colleagues in the military town of Colorado Springs.
When we were headed back to the airport in the presidential motorcade we heard that a U.S. Airforce jet that had participated in the graduation ceremony’s famous flyover had crashed into a field. The pilot safely ejected and when we arrived at the airport Obama shook the pilot’s hand before getting on Air Force One.
The Associated Press pool reporter covered the moment, and a photographer for the Colorado Springs Gazette, Christian Murdock, captured the moment. The photo was used in newspapers across the country in conjunction with the report from the AP reporter.
Was it a big deal?
Maybe not internationally, but it mattered to the community, service members and to the historical record.
I rest better knowing that Associated Press reporters and photographers are our eyes and ears with the White House pool.
Megan Schrader is the editor of The Denver Post’s opinion pages.
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