White House Under Fire For Barring Associated Press Reporters From Multiple Events Over ‘Gulf of America’

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

A White House reporter for the Associated Press was barred from a Tuesday event in the Oval Office in which President Donald Trump signed executive orders and billionaire Elon Musk took questions from the press, the editor of the wire service said in a statement.

Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing government agencies to work with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has carried out a dizzying blitz on the federal bureaucracy in what the administration says is an effort to slash the size of government.

Julie Pace, the executive editor of the Associated Press, said in a statement that one of her reporters was barred from the signing over the outlet’s guidance on Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico. One of Trump’s first moves in office was renaming the body of water the Gulf of America.

Pace wrote:

As a global news organization, The Associated Press informs billions of people around the world every day with factual, nonpartisan journalism.

Today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon AP’s reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing.

It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.

Following Trump’s executive order, the Associated Press said it would continue to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico, given that has been its internationally recognized name for hundreds of years. It would, however, note that the United States now calls it the Gulf of America.

The White House did not respond to an immediate request for comment regarding Pace’s statement. In Trump’s first term, his administration repeatedly sought to ban reporters over questions he deemed hostile. In 2018, when Jim Acosta served as chief White House correspondent for CNN, he had his credentials stripped in retaliation over his coverage. Kaitlan Collins was also barred from an event over her coverage of the president.

The barring of a reporter from the Oval Office drew condemnations from the White House Correspondents’ Association as well as press freedom groups.

“In the relationship between the press and the Office of the President, coverage and standards are entirely in the purview of individual organizations,” said WHCA president Eugene Daniels, a reporter for Politico.

“The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions,” he said. “The move by the administration to bar a reporter from The Associated Press from an official event open to news coverage today is unacceptable. The WHCA stands with The Associated Press and calls on the administration to immediately change course.”

First Amendment advocacy organization FIRE wrote in a statement, “Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom.”

“That’s viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional,” said FIRE director of public advocacy Aaron Terr. “President Trump has the authority to change how the U.S. government refers to the Gulf. But he cannot punish a news organization for using another term. The role of our free press is to hold those in power accountable, not to act as their mouthpiece. Any government efforts to erode this fundamental freedom deserve condemnation.”

UPDATE 02/12: AP media reporter David Bauder reported Wednesday morning that “a second AP reporter was barred from a late-evening event in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room.”