Associated Press Vs. White House On Gulf of America

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.

About the Author

Philip Klein

Philip Klein is the editor of National Review Online.

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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.