WASHINGTON ― Today The Associated Press, tomorrow ABC News.
Or CBS. Or CNN. Or Politico. Or The New York Times.
If you’re a normal American with a normal life and normal day-to-day worries, you probably haven’t heard that Donald Trump and his White House are punishing The Associated Press, the world’s premier wire service, for not getting in line and calling the Gulf of Mexico, as it’s been known for centuries, the “Gulf of America,” as per the new presidential decree.
The White House has barred the AP’s reporter from participating in the White House pool since Tuesday. On Thursday, the administration upped the punishment to keep the AP out of a news conference open to the entire press corps. And Friday, it announced that the banishment is now indefinite and has expanded to the AP’s traditional seat on Air Force One.
The AP’s crime? Updating its widely used style manual to advise that while Trump’s renaming of Alaska’s Mt. Denali back to Mt. McKinley was within Trump’s purview because the peak is wholly in U.S. territory, the Gulf of Mexico is another matter, and other countries are not referring to it as the Gulf of America.
It sounds petty, and it is — and yet at the same time, it is pretty damn scary in a constitutional republic with a First Amendment and an ostensibly free press.
What Trump’s White House is trying to do here is clear: Only those news outlets that cater to the president’s whims on any given issue will be allowed access to his official events.
It’s true that most normal Americans won’t care about any of this. It’s about as inside-the-Beltway as it gets. That said, Americans, or at least Americans who want to hang on to our democracy, should care, and deeply.
At issue is the White House “pool,” the group of 13 reporters, photographers, videographers and sound engineers who are brought into events where space is tight, such as the Oval Office, since bringing in the larger contingent of reporters who cover the presidency each day is not practical. The job of every member of that pool is to share whatever is learned from the encounter with the White House press corps at large.
While the White House has always controlled the size of the pool (on rare occasions, it might just be two or three journalists), it has never chosen which news organizations participate on any given day or any given event. That prerogative belongs to the White House Correspondents’ Association — the professional body that speaks for the press corps on a range of issues, including accreditation, travel and coordinating access to events.
The AP has historically had one of the three permanent wire service slots in the pool each day. The others right now are Reuters and Bloomberg, but neither matches the AP in reach, either in the U.S. or globally.
People might assume that the “pool” is antagonistic to Trump, but that’s hardly the case. While individual reporters who happen to be in that rotation may ask questions of Trump that he doesn’t want to answer, by and large, the existence of the pool benefits any president — and particularly Trump, who came from the television entertainment world.
Last weekend’s travel pool trip to the Super Bowl is a perfect example. While there was an in-flight news conference in which Trump was asked a number of questions he didn’t like — including a couple from me — that was only a small part of the trip.
On Friday night, the pool reporters waited for hours in a van outside Mar-a-Lago, in a parking lot, in a driveway, and finally outside a small ballroom where Trump was going to speak to Republican senators he had invited there (profits from that dinner went into his pocket, by the way).
We covered a half-hour rally-type speech full of the usual lies and outrage — that the 2020 election was stolen from him, for example, or his claim without evidence that USAID employees were taking “kickbacks.” We dutifully recorded his words and disseminated them to the broader press corps. There was no opportunity to ask questions. We were basically stenographers.
The actual visit to the Super Bowl is an even better example. There were two photo opportunities staged. The first was upon Trump’s arrival when he came onto a corner of the field to greet local police and victims of the New Year’s Day terror attack. But perhaps because we were running a half hour late following Trump’s morning round of golf with Tiger Woods, there was no real “greeting” with first responders, no time for reporters to actually observe the president interacting with regular Americans. Just a group photo. The whole thing lasted less than two minutes.
Then, an hour later, the traveling reporters were brought back onto the field specifically so the pool TV camera could focus on Trump standing in his third-deck box during the playing of the national anthem. To the best of my knowledge, less than two seconds of that camera view was used by Fox Sports’ producers during their broadcast.
In other words, the White House pool’s existence for the entire Super Bowl visit was manipulated by Trump’s White House for his benefit. There was no “news” value to anything we did in New Orleans.
There is, of course, the need for news outlets to be with the president of the United States in case actual news does happen. That the pool is occasionally used by a White House for its own ends, is, I suppose, a necessary cost.
The fundamental issue, though, is the composition of that pool. Trump has every right to decide which events are open to the press, or not, and at which events he will take questions, or not.
What he should not have the right to do is decide which outlets are permitted to take part in the pool. Which is why how the WHCA responds to Trump here is critical. For the last three days, we’ve issued strongly worded statements, with a strongly worded letter in works on Friday, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to work.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
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Here’s what might work: Trump needs and wants the reach of the real media, not just his fan club. We should stand by our colleagues at the AP, which is actually an alma mater for many of us. We should tell the White House that if the AP is not invited to participate in his photo ops, then we’re not interested, either. Trump enjoys punching down on and mocking reporters who nevertheless have to call him “Mr. President.” We don’t have to let him. Tell them we’re happy to send in a pool camera instead, and he’s free to say whatever he wants for however long he wants.
Because if he gets away with doing this to the world’s largest news organization, he can and will do it to any and all of us.