The AP has no claim to a slot at every Oval Office event, but access shouldn’t hinge on whether news outlets use the government-approved term for a body of ...
The ongoing fight between the White House and the Associated Press is a perfect example of one of the frustrations of writing in the current environment. On the one hand, barring AP reporters from various White House events because the news organization continues to use the term Gulf of Mexico rather than the Trump-renamed Gulf of America is silly and Big Brother-ish. On the other hand, AP journalists suffer from an obnoxious entitlement mentality in which somehow it is an egregious violation of the First Amendment if they aren’t allowed to ask questions of the president in the Oval Office, which very few reporters are able to do in any administration.
The AP’s vaunted status is a relic of an era in which it played a role in disseminating neutral content to newspapers around the world, conveying information that would otherwise be unavailable. In modern times, White House events are broadcast on TV and readily available on demand to anybody with a smartphone or access to an internet connection. President Trump has sat for hours of questions from reporters from a variety of outlets since taking office, so it isn’t as if nobody gets to challenge the president on anything without the AP. And the AP has long since abandoned any pretense of being a neutral news organization. It has become filled with left-wing bias and engaged in its own Orwellian manipulation of language to further progressive ideology, not to mention its regular habit of passing off Hamas propaganda as news.
What’s more, Democratic administrations regularly shun conservative reporters and there is never any outrage over it. I covered health-care policy extensively during the Obama administration. Early on, in a conference call, I asked then–Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the double-counting of Medicare in Obamacare, citing a Congressional Budget Office report. That was the last time I ever got to ask a question on an HHS conference call.
When our friends over at the Washington Free Beacon exposed former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s history of plagiarism, the AP blared, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” That’s what the AP thinks of real journalism that doesn’t support its left-wing point of view.
What’s frustrating in all of this is that, the way things work these days, one side demands that you point and laugh and cheer the ouster of the AP from official White House events, and another side demands that you condemn, on principle, the draconian word-policing going on by the administration. That leaves no room for those who believe that the administration is going way overboard in its pettiness but who also have a tough time coming to the defense of a news organization that gives condescending lectures about journalistic ethics while routinely and uncritically citing casualty statistics from a terrorist group.
In sum, the AP has no real claim to a slot at every Oval Office event, but access decisions shouldn’t hinge on whether news organizations use the government-approved term for a body of water.