In and Out of the Oval Office

Last week, a federal judge ordered the White House to end its ban on the Associated Press, which has (mostly) stopped the news agency from covering the Oval Office and similar settings, over the agency’s refusal to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in line with President Trump’s wishes. The judge said that the AP was not entitled to special access, but does have a constitutional right to equal treatment: “Under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists—be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” he wrote. “The Constitution requires no less.” If the ruling was, perhaps, surprising (as I noted in this newsletter two weeks ago, the judge had reportedly sounded skeptical of the AP’s case during a key hearing), it was certainly embraced as a much-needed win—for the AP, of course, but also for a wider industry under political attack. For The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan, the ruling suggested that, in Trump’s America, “standing up for one’s principles may not be just a gesture made in vain.” For the ex-CNN anchor Jim Acosta, it was evidence of the fact that “our courts can work,” and of his proposition that “folks need to have some semblance of hope that the guardrails of our democracy will hold.”