Despite the court decision, it doesn’t appear like the Associated Press will be returning to the White House regularly anytime soon.
A pool position in the Trump administration’s press corps that had previously been exclusive to employees of the Associated Press, one of the most widely read news organizations worldwide, was abolished on Wednesday.
Sources close to the decision makers say the decision is expected to stand up in court. The decision follows a federal court’s ruling that the administration must reinstate the news organization after rescinding its White House credentials due to a semantics dispute regarding the renamed Gulf of America.
Customers of newswire who depend on the AP and rivals like Reuters to send reporters around the world and sell their articles on a subscription basis will be affected. According to the AP, it distributes its coverage to over 900 locations worldwide and over 3,000 locations in the United States.
“The administration’s actions continue to disregard the fundamental American freedom to speak without government control or retaliation,” the news agency told CNN in a statement Tuesday night, expressing dismay. The American people are seriously harmed by this.
The “press pool,” a nomadic phalanx of reporters that accompany the president and government officials on trips and in cramped briefing rooms, is under question. All members of the White House Correspondents Association, which up until the Trump administration was in charge of choosing its own assignees, are expected to be covered by the rotating journalists chosen for the assignment.
There will now be a second print journalist and wires will be eligible for the two print seats, according to a new document formalizing pool policy that was released on Tuesday. The AP and Reuters will be forced to compete with other newspapers for pool space if they are not granted priority wire places.
The conflict started when the White House demanded that AP stylists start calling the former Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Many media sources and digital map providers, including Apple and Google, have since followed this adjustment. Instead, citing Trump’s executive order announcing the change, the AP has stuck to the water body’s long-standing previous name.
Consequently, the White House started excluding AP reporters from press briefings and later pool parties. The AP sued in federal court, claiming violations of the First and Fifth Amendments.
Trevor McFadden, a U.S. District Judge, said last week that “the Constitution forbids viewpoint discrimination, even in a nonpublic forum like the Oval Office,” siding with the wire outlet.
Despite the AP’s use of derogatory language, McFadden stated that the White House needed to “place the AP on an equal playing field as similarly situated outlets.”
According to CNN, the White House said that the judge’s ruling is reflected in its pool plan, putting the AP on a “equal playing field” with “similarly situated outlets” like Reuters and Bloomberg.
